Sunlight: A JTHM Story
by VeralicProductions
Summary: It has been a few years since Johnny left, and a few years since the Human Negative was left unchecked. Desperate to find another proper waste lock, Satan initiates a contest to four eligable people. Who will become the next 'King of Killers'
1. And so our story beginS

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoy.

* * *

The soft glow of a television set illuminated the dust covered, mold inhabited ruins. The TV stood alone in the middle of a rotted, hole-ridden floor and worked despite the evidence of the powerless structure it was plugged into. The channel changed, as if by some ethereal force, to a news station currently broadcasting a story.

"…_from what we can tell, the rise in suicide is not directly linked"_ Reported one female correspondent against a city street backdrop. _"So far, police have no leads on the identity of the former killer, nor are there any major suspects at this time. One thing is certain, though; the city has never been more peaceful. In other news, grab you kids and funny hats, the circus is coming to town!"_ The television switched to static and then to black.

Peace was irrelevant now. The city had never been more controlled, that's certain. No rational explanation can ever be reached as to where all the heated yelling and chaotic rushing went. One day, all the turmoil and stress of the world just vanished from the people of the city, nay the world. All across the planet, paranoia was no longer an emotion or a debatable disease; it had lost its meaning. Insanity was just a hollow word.

Still, the world had never known quite a significant fear in recent years either. Within a short time span, many countries dissolved and united with each other, forming strong unions across the globe as led by ruthlessly bureaucratic czars. In this city, the evidence of a dictatorship was clear and precise. The city was not only delegated by but owned by a conglomerate corporation from the west.

It was official from the moment he left, the world is gone.

* * *

"Are you the boy's father?" The security guard asked. A smiling man in a three-piece suit continued walking down the hall.

"No, his real father died and his mother left him long ago. I'm his god-father." The guard kept walking with him and gave an apathetic sigh. The dull life of a hospital's insanity ward guard had lost its flavor ever since the tenants were being cured. Vaccines and medicinal supplements were recently manufactured by the city's conglomerate to manipulate the neural reception of the brain and turn off most of its outer functions. In short, these pills made people zombies.

Finally, they reached the end of the long, white hall and the guard pushed open the door. A large room lit by the morning light came into view, with only one person seated in the middle of the table-covered hall. This was the cafeteria, but at six in the morning there were little inhabitants. The smiling man waved the guard off and started toward the seated boy.

The guard shut and locked the door behind him, waking the adolescent from his nap on the table. It was a young boy of about fourteen with short, neat hair and fair complexion. Clutched in his arm that rested on the table was a rather demure and, perhaps, evil looking teddy bear. The smiling man sat down opposite the boy and straightened his tie.

"Are you Todd Casil?" The man asked. The boy gave a half-asleep nod and sat up straight.

"Yes, sir." He replied.

"Have you been taking your medicine?" the man asked jokingly.

"Well, I don't take the same medicine as everyone else. It changed people, so I didn't want it. I just exercise and eat well."

"Well, that's good." The man took off his glasses but kept his eyes closed. Then he grabbed the skin on his face and ripped it off in a swift motion with his boney hand. Todd fell out of his chair and crawled backwards at the towering visage before the light hit the demon again.

"Todd? You seem scared" The demon said in a concerned way with a soft Spanish accent. Todd stood back up and looked back at him.

"I was just surprised. It's been a long time, Mr. Diablo."

"Senor Diablo" he corrected, raising his finger. "Now Todd, do you know why I'm here?"

"To take me away from here?" Todd answered hopefully. Diablo chuckled and patted him on the head.

"That's right. My son Pepito has begged me to release you and take you in. He's taken quite a liking to you, young Todd."

"I'll have to thank him. He was the only person that tried to help me…my parents probably think I'm dead or something."

"It has been a few years. I wouldn't be surprised. That's not important right now, though. Please get ready to leave immediately and I'll take you home." Todd smiled and nodded, then rushed out the opposite door and into another white hall. Satan hovered over to the window and gazed out through narrow, black eyes at the rising sun.

"It has been far too long. The curtain of this world is about to close." He snapped his long fingers and the shadows behind him started twisting around into humanoid shapes. "Deliver the messages. The candidates have been selected already." The shadow creatures nodded and silently slipped out the windows.

_It is time to find a new one._ Todd came bursting through the doors excitedly and with a terrified look on his face. He had changed from his white clothes to a more contemporary dark green shirt and black slacks. Slung over his shoulder was a duffle bag that had been hastily packed with pieces of clothes still visibly sticking out from the zipper, and the demented bear still in hand.

"Come," the devil said as he pulled the flesh back onto his form and transformed back into the normal human he came in as. "Let's get you home, Todd." A flustered Todd agreed and hurried to the demon-man's side.

_This won't be so bad I guess_ Todd thought as they walked out together. _School might still be bad, but Pepito is a good friend. Plus he said that his school wasn't like our elementary school with all the zombies._ The main doors opened after Todd was formally dismissed from the facility that was steadily receding behind him as he got in the car. _Maybe my life won't be so bad anymore. No, it definitely won't! I can feel it! Today is a great day!_

Satan grimaced under his happy human disguise. He could feel the air getting thick with some unmentionable mist, the sky blackening with heated smog filled with arcane pressure. The world itself was steadily crumbling under the weight of humanities ills and torments, the negative pressure had been building to the point of explosion. The bomb was about to drop, and he could only hope silently that his messages would be received in time.

* * *

The shadow beasts of Hades quickly darted through the alcoves of the upper hell like lightning and reached their predestined spots in no time at all. Each message was contained in a black envelope with a pentagram seal only its recipient could break. Each servant delivered the letters to the most obvious place they could be found.

In a maximum security prison solitary cell, a letter drifted under the door and settled at the feet of a brawny man sleeping against the closet-sized wall. Another letter was placed in a box of envelopes nearly full to bursting at the side of an apartment door. The third letter was sent floating into an open bedroom window, where it settled on a dresser top surrounded by a myriad of stuffed animals.

The final letter was snatched from mid-air. The man who claimed it stood slim and tall in a formal black suit with a blood red tie and wearing narrow, circular glasses. He lifted the letter slowly to his face and gazed and the blank front of the envelope, which felt of tanned flesh. He slid a finger across the back and opened the seal. Black mist hissed out as the man pulled out the letter within and started to read.

"_To whoever receives this letter, congratulations! You have been hand-picked by the lord of the underworld Satan to lead a campaign of carnage throughout this world. You see, the negative human emotions of the planet are reaching a dangerous critical level, and must be accordingly withheld in a properly toned and trained human being. You are one of those humans, one who has endured countless trials of indescribable suffering and pain, whose emotions are at the peak of rot and decay, you are a perfect candidate to become the next proverbial __**'King of Killers'**__! If you wish to become the most feared and powerful person on this plane of existence, just hold on to this letter and a representative of the Dark Lord himself will find you soon enough. Once again, congratulations, and the best of luck to you, future King!"_

_-Signed Remsius of Hell_

The man took another long stare at the letter and pocketed it before continuing on his way out of the alley he was in. A barely audible groan was heard from a vaguely human shape, but was extinguished with a long, final breath. Before turning back onto the street, the man turned around to examine the scene he was leaving: blood soaking the ground, bodies torn to pieces and nailed to the brick walls, heads of unfortunate souls impaled on metal pipes with expressions of inexpressible fear.

"King of Killers…" the man mumbled in a low voice. He continued off into the city's labyrinth of buildings and cars, heading for the tallest building there. He adjusted his glasses slightly and smirked as he paced down the dark street.


	2. Let's PLay A Game

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoy.

* * *

The economy-sized car pulled into an oil-stained driveway in front of a modest looking house with a small, ornamental crucifix affixed to the door. The happy looking man and eager looking boy stepped out of the car together in front of their home. Todd squeezed the filthy bear in his hand and walked lively in his sneakers up to the door, following after the man. The man motioned for Todd to ring the doorbell out f courtesy, to which the boy politely complied. A catchy little ditty rang overhead and inside the house.

The door was nearly thrown open soon after the bell rang by a hideously demonic looking creature. His head was covered in boils and scars, with two huge horns protruding outward and curling back from its forehead. The creature had the same build and was the same height as Todd, who was rather skinny and of moderate muscular build himself.

"Todd?" a Spanish voice inquired. "Is that you?" Todd nodded and received a gentle pat on the head from his adoptive father in the guise of an ordinary businessman.

"Todd is going to be living here from now on. His parents finally signed the agreement papers." Upon stepping over the threshold and into the house, the visage dissolved instantly and Senor Diablo towered over his son. He removed the fedora from his head and set it neatly on the hat rack, next to his wife's sun hat and a human foot.

"So then, you decided to join the army of infinite damnation after all, yes?" the young Antichrist hopefully asked. Todd shook his head and stepped into the house, closing the door behind him.

"No, I just live here now I guess. Thanks a lot for helping me out all those times, Pepito" The young devil leaned back in his stance and crossed his arms, huffing in jest with a smile.

"I only did all that so you would join me" he said jokingly. Todd picked up on the joke, one they had shared many times previous and laughed.

"Well, I half joined; I'm your brother now." Todd and Pepito enjoyed a quiet moment together and laughed, only ending on the note of some horrible screaming and banging on a hall closet door. Pepito promptly marched over and hit the door several times, shouting some obscenities in Spanish to quiet whatever was down there.

"So, is this going to be the same as last time or will you have your own room?" Pepito asked.

"Well, your room is big enough for both of us, but I think I'd like to have my own room. I've had to share a room with someone for a long time now, and they usually never slept at all." Todd mused as he and his 'brother' proceeded up the stairs.

"You're like a magnet to insomniacs, you know that?" Pepito joked. Todd chuckled to himself, considering just how right Pepito was. They both stopped as Pepito knocked on a door at the end of the hall. "Mom, Todd's here!"

"Oh, come in, please!" A warming woman's voice called from inside. Todd reached for the knob and opened the door to the sight of a perfectly peaceful room with a woman of possible late thirties standing over an ironing board. The stark and obvious contrast between this charming, Christian woman and her son, the Antichrist, gave Todd an amusing smile that he kept out of gratitude.

"Hello there, Todd. How have you been?" the woman asked cheerfully as she picked up a piece of clothing to iron.

"I've been better, but I can't complain all that much." She smiled at his response and started up her iron.

"Well, our home is your home, at least now it is" she said with a light tittering. Todd also laughed lightly out of courtesy. "Anyway, after I'm done here I'll clear out the guest room and you can sleep there, okay?"

"That's fine, thank you" Todd said as politely as he knew he should. The woman smiled at him one last time before some unknown gravitational force pulled him away and down the hall.

"Well," Pepito started having Todd secured by the collar of his T-shirt, "there you have it. Welcome to the family, Squee." Todd smiled, not having heard his nickname in a long time. He turned and gave a happy nod to his friend, who proceeded to open a door marked with splotched of black paint and dried blood. On the other side of the door was a staircase that led down into a twisting chasm that was bordered by screaming bodies and wailing souls.

"We're not going to play this again, are we?" Todd asked concernedly. Pepito smirked and started to jog down the wide stairs.

"First one down gets first pick!" he shouted over the screams. With his bear still in hand and his backpack thrown into the empty guest room, Squee started running down the steps into the hellish abyss after his friend to play as they used to do. The door slammed shut behind them.

* * *

Somewhere across the world, in a lavish mansion that towers over the depressing denizens of a rural village, there sits a princess. Both literally and figuratively, this young woman is indeed a princess. She is denied nothing, regardless as to what that something may be. If she wants a pony, a herd is brought to her. If she wants a car, a fleet is driven in straight from the manufacturing plant. If she wants someone dead, she gets to kill them.

And so, here sits the first candidate for the fallen title of 'King of Killers'. On her particular letter, she crossed out every reference to a 'King' and scrawled in 'Queen' with her own hand. She sat on top of her intrinsic throne at the back of a colorfully decorated hall, adorned in fine silk and smelling deeply of strawberries. This young girl, of nearly eighteen, sat with her long braided blonde-as-the-sun hair in a modern refashioning of a medieval gown. The length was hemmed and the bust widened to accentuate her chest and show off her legs. She even had a tiara in her hair that sparkled with pink diamonds.

How could an innocent girl such as her be nominated for such a ghastly position? The entire waiting staff of her royal 'pain in the colon' majesty wondered just that. What's more, they were all convinced that the letter she held so closely and tucked in her bosom was cursed. Everyone who had touched it even once was overcome with some form of manic emotions and ended up killing themselves. They had already lost ten servants who tried to examine the letter, and no more were willing to risk themselves to satisfy the princess's unending curiosity.

"Ho and hum," the girl announced in a very dry tone. "I do so wish that I had something to do. Waiting for this messenger is ever so boring." As if on cue, a line of several servants walked out from behind a column in the room and bowed before her.

"Is there something her highness desires? Perhaps she would wish to watch a film in the theatre or browse her selection of dresses before her commencement ceremony?" the older man announced his intentions as stealthily and politely as possible. The ceremony in question was to arrange for the young woman's marriage and the staff's incidental freedom from her at that time.

"No," the girls said with a sigh as she waved her hand, "I think not. But I do think I have an idea to relieve this horrid boredom." The staff leaned in close as the princess stood up and started walking forward. "Bring me a prisoner. I want to practice."

"Practice what, your highness?"

"My game…" She said deviously. "I'm going to be a Queen yet…" this time she said in a much more hideously dark tone. The staff gave a synchronized shiver and followed after her, with a few men and women detaching to call in the local prison. Something was definitely wrong with that letter, as she had never acted this way before.

_I am the greatest, and so only I deserve such a prestigious title! I will become, the 'Queen of Killers'!_ The young girl smiled evilly as the guards marched in with a large and mean looking man, kicking him to his knees. The princess raised a baseball bat high over her head and swung it down with devastating force. A splatter of blood shot up and into her face. Her smile widened across the expanse of her rosy cheeks as she continued to beat the head of this inmate into porridge.


	3. The Account of an Inmate's Release

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoy.

* * *

A tall and massively muscular man was being marched down the hall of a dank prison. On his feet were chains, on his wrists were bladed cuffs in case he would make an unpredictable move, around his neck was a collar with many spikes protruding and over his eyes was a black blindfold. This mammoth man of dirt-brown skin was being escorted by ten guards at once.

Usually the walls of a prison during a man's last march were never quiet. There was always a riotous yelling of taunts and last-second quips to the man's sexuality, but not this man. This man had far too much respect within these walls, far to much fear. HE was only known by the name he had made for himself during he murderous trek across the Earth, and that name was 'The Mortician'.

Called 'Mort' for short, and only by those who were within his air-tight inner circle, he commanded utter respect and even admiration even from the warden of the prison. All the freedom and power to leave the retched place at his leisure, yet he stayed. When asked why he would demand that prisoners conform to his system and accept their punishment, he would always respond

"Because destiny has no alternative. You were destined to be here, and I am destined to lead you."

Every day was the same for a while. He knew he had only a few short years to try and reform the inmates and make an army out of them. That was his deal: If he could make the inmates that were in the system able to outsmart and outperform a group of special-ops soldiers, he would be released and granted a position in army training. He would have succeeded if not for the diminutive slackers in the security squad. Apparently, the guards themselves had to participate and weren't up to standards.

And now to honor his agreement, Mort was to die via an electric current that would run through his body until his heart ceased to beat. A full audience of political minds and journalists had been gathered to observe his execution for legal purposes. The prisoners all took it upon themselves to let his death be known by refusing to move from their beds, no matter what may happen.

Finally, the guards escorted the man into the one-way windowed room with a large chair built into the wall. They removed the cuffs and the collar, as well as the chains and the blindfold then hastily left the room. Mort looked once at his fated deathbed/chair and sat down. He needn't secure his own feet or arms, he just pulled the large metal helmet down and leaned back while the guards waited in the other room. In exactly two minutes, this man would die.

* * *

Two tall, skinny demons wrapped in crimson robes slithered off of the wall and down a dark hallway. They were there to retrieve the latter and its carrier. They threw open a closet door and found only a letter lying next to a small pool of blood. One picked it up and hissed incoherent words to the other that was lurching over. It nodded and rushed off in a mist while the other disappeared into the shadows.

The one that ran off stalked quickly down the widening corridors that bordered with killers and criminals. In the dank light of the main ward, the demon's face was reveled as a nearly skeletal head of totally burnt flesh complete with exposed teeth. It heard the chattering of some men down the hall, so it proceeded to find the noise. It came upon two men talking to each other from between a wall about some man named 'Mort'.

"Pardon, please, but my partner and I seem to be misplaced among the perplexity of thy prison." Spoke the ghostly creature. The two men gave it a curious glare, then a fascinated grunt. "Would you please point me to the proper point of one powerful person as ye peons may perceive as…predestined?" The two men gaped at the hissing monster, both to frightened to speak up for themselves and instead pointed down the hall to what they assumed would be the execution chamber. The creature tipped his hand from his head and disappeared in a blur of darkness.

"Did you just see that?" One inmate said through the bars of his cell.

"Just relax, man. It's probably the crack still in your system, okay? Just relax." The other calmly replied. Both turned away and decided that now was a good time to sleep.

The demon sprinted through the building, hovering quickly across the shadowed floor and bounding silently off the musty walls. The doors became steadily smaller and less constrictive looking the further it progressed. At the end of the long hallway that reeked of false hopes the demon came upon the hushed conversations of several human. Without being noticed, it crept up to the door and leaned the side of its head to listen, even though it had no ears. Into the demon's head flooded the laughter and mocking aimed at one poor individual.

"…Pity" The demon mused at length.

* * *

"One minute left until lights-on" one guard announced with his hand on the button that would send the criminal to his death. All the major names of the media were present and discussing the justification of this man's death amongst themselves. Will his death ever bring back those he killed? No and neither would it do much good for the prison system as a whole. The prisoners would doubtlessly be less and less productive out of spite and rebellion, and eventually they may even attempt an escape. If the competition with the Spec-Ops men was any indication, an escape would be the worst-case scenario for the guards.

"Man," one guard spoke to another, "I hope he doesn't drag this out very long. Publicity like this ain't good for us." He took a long drag from his cigarette and looked at his companion outside the doors to the chair room expectantly.

"Yeah, the death of a prison hero. It'll suck if our names show up in it." His response got a positive nod from the other man. He pulled out a cigarette and offered it, but the other declined politely. Out of the shadows, a flowing red phantom started creeping up to the door.

"Hey." One guard said as he noticed something. "Hey!" This time with more force, and throwing up his gun in armament. "You're not allowed to be here! Leave immediately!" The demon continued to hover over with reaching, skeletal arms that were tightly shrouded with an icy haze. The guards both steadied their guns and aimed shakily at the encroaching monster. "I'm warning you sir...or madam. Turn back-" The demon phased straight through the poor man and into the wall, leaving the man gasping for breath like a fish on land.

"Thirty seconds, people. Mort if you've got any last words, now's the time." The man smiled on his throne of death. The audience leaned in to listen, but all attention turned away from him as the door was forced open to reveal a hideous visage. Unheard screams of terror resonated from behind the one-way glass as the monster shredded apart everyone.

"I can say only this:" Began the killer on the chair as the reporters bled on the walls and ceiling. "Whatever is and shall be come is beyond the scope of my own knowledge, and far outside of my own power to stop at once, but what was, was grand indeed. All that had been was marvelous for me, but it is unfortunate that this must be the curtain call." The clock in the adjoining room ticked down to five seconds as the clock overlooked the frozen body of the guard on the floor.

"I can only say, it was destiny."

Unflinchingly, the clock struck zero and Mort stood up with his demonic escorts on either side of him. "Indeed it was" retorted the burnt one. Mort smiled and looked at the icy skeleton, who handed him the letter. He took it and smiled widely. All three of these demented characters exited the prison together, but not before reclaiming all of Mort's personal items.

One trench coat with custom sewn hood and an occult-design of an eye in the palm of a hand on the back. One pair of combat boots. One pair of leather gloves. One pair of goggles tinted black. One cashier's check worth 150,000 marked for today's date…One shovel.

* * *

With his newly required equipment, which he hadn't touched in nearly five years, he marched in tandem with his demonic entourage to a black, seemingly burning limousine. The demon's opened the dual doors so his massive self could crawl into the surprisingly roomy interior. Inside was a man, at least part of a man, sitting and smiling with a glass of wine at his lips.

"So," Mort began, "my fate has brought me here. As I had known. But where on shall this stream of life carry me?"

The skinny man in a black tuxedo with a blood-red shirt underneath took a long sip, finishing off the murky contents of his glass. He raised the brim of his black fedora to reveal an empty hole where his face should otherwise be.

"All the way to the great sea, my friend." He spoke through blood-red lips. Mort stared at him for a second, then turned his eyes back to the lush carpet on the floor. The car started moving down the road with the gates of the prison wide open behind them. The prisoners wouldn't escape for a few days out of refusal to leave their beds, and the guards and staff were all dead.

The second candidate has been gathered for this twisted little contest.


	4. Let the games begin, already!

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

The fiery roars of bloody murder and ravaging carnage filled the dank and bloodied halls of the courtyard and castle. The two armies had met each other on various fronts, with neither side making noticeable progress in any direction. In the main courtyard the giants standing idly, waiting for orders from their heavenly leaders.

Pepito and Squee were both deeply enamoured with their favorite hellion pass-time, controlling individual armies of darkness and hellfire in an artificial battlefield. It was like a video game, as Squee had noticed, but the demon's were real and usually hated losing. Thusly, the demon's usually hated Squee.

Moreover, Squee's armies were mostly comprised of humanistic demons who had led terrible lives. Soldiers and general sinners made up the infantry, and Serial Killers made up the elite forces and special ops. Pepito always joked with Squee that he 'should become a criminologist'. Even Squee's giants even just happened to be deeply malformed and huge humans that threw rocks and trees around.

Pepito, being the to-be king of all that is Hell, had his army specially comprised of appropriately hellish beings. Some with tentacles instead of arms (or faces) and most of them wielding some kind of horrid, stabbing instrument. All the troops were diminutive and robotic in taking commands, which made them great at pushing back the line but terrible at adapting to the humans' ever-changing attack patterns. A blind rush forward with proverbial guns a-blazing was the anti-christ's best and only real strategy.

Even so, Squee usually lost in sheer power that he couldn't make up in superior tactics.

"Look!" Pepito shouted in joy across from the viewing table, "my side's winning!"

"That was luck," Todd whined, "really dumb luck." The room in which the two commanders played and gave their orders was similar to that of any other stanky suburban basement, only larger and with bleeding wallpaper. The table that stood between them was a demonically decorated with black skulls and blood dripping tubes for legs. The flat surface held the actual screen that showed either player the points of interest and translated special reports from the troops.

"Luck nothing," Pepito began to brag, "I just have wicked-awesome aim, is all." Both young men were discussing Pepito's giant's move of hurling a large chunk of building across the courtyard, over the troops and into another room which caved in, trapping and killing all of Todd's troops and sending them back to the starting area.

"He was berserking" Todd complained, "and I can still make it up in the long run." He motioned around on a small command panel with his fingers until a short message popped up: 'Are you sure, kid?' it read in bold, red letters. Todd pressed down hard, and twelve coffins were teleported onto the playfield, deep within the catacombs of the castle battleground.

"Those guys again, eh?" Pepito said seethingly. "Shit. You play your cards well, Squee." Todd nodded and smiled triumphantly in jest while his friend snarled under his darkening eyes. He quickly started maneuvering troops with his fingers on the small command pad in an attempt to set up a viable defense. All his current troops started moving back and into the central courtyard to reinforce his giants.

The coffins settled on the floor of the dungeonous crypt with many thuds, and they started to open. Out of the rotted oak boxes crept twelve of the most disastrously dangerous and superhumanly powerful murderers in all of Hell's history. Many of them had some ancient aesthetics about them, some in Chinese prison garb and a few dressed as English royalty. All of them had some form of deadly weapon and they all had their own free will. Pepito knew just how fucked he was.

"All availabe troops!" Pepito shouted into his command box. "Move with haste to the northern cathedral! _ANDELE!!_" His final screech sent the demons scattering about and away from most of Squee's troops. Those still locked in combat continued to fight, but moved out as the last of their adversaries died. Pepito was playing a minimalist defensive strategy. By exploiting the churchophobic weakness of one of Squee's super-troops, he had given himself a slightly larger chance at success.

All that was left was to see who would be the final victor as time slowly ticked away.

* * *

Satan sat at his hauntingly sadistic looking desk reviewing paperwork. The bureaucracy of Hell was painfully boring to the master of limitless torment, as he sifted through the stacks of drab looking papers to find one of relative interest. Some were more interesting than others, but none had anything he was looking for. No murders or psychological suicides, just normal, crazy suicides. It seems that the fun part of his job was over before it really began.

"Without him around," Satan began in a jaded tone, "there is no worth to this job anymore…there's no point." He finished sadly, letting his hand go limp and a suicide notice drift slowly to the floor. A knock on the study door riled him back up as his wife entered the room.

"Hello, dear." She sweetly said. "Another long night I assume?"

"No, dear," the jaded king of darkness began in a tired voice, "I'll come to bed soon." His wife closed the door with a nod and a smile, and Satan turned back to his scattered pile in the dank, red light. He took one last gaze at the black, gothic phone on his desk and got up to leave. Before he stepped out of the doorway he turned back around and whispered softly and seethingly to himself

"Ring, dammit, ring…" The door slammed behind him, sending the papers rustling to the floor.

* * *

"Ladies and gentlemen of the press," an associate started in a crowded lobby, "President and CEO of _Noche I__nternacional_, Mr. Samuel Corazo." A roar of applause sprang out as another man rose up from his seat and walked up to the podium. He was a man of medium height and thin build. His hair slicked back against his head and two long stretches of hair drooped down his face. His eyes were covered by elliptical glasses that glared hazily into the crowd, showing no sign of his eyes at all.

"Good afternoon," the slender man said as the crowd started to hush. "I am pleased to announce a new program will be available in our city. We open this program with the hopes to help our country in economic need by allowing the unemployed men and women of the city take part in it. The project will consist of several months of construction and development to help push people out of the slums and into the mainstream. We will be adding onto our fair city by building: two hospitals, one college campus, and four apartment block buildings at different corners of the city. All workers will be paid for their work, as well as be given free housing and food during the extent of the project…"

The meeting continued. The man, president of the corporation that had almost literally purchased the entire city and its people, continued to go on about the details of his miraculous plan of restoration. The jobs and lives of thousands rested on the inevitable success of this conquest for peace. It's hard to believe, from an inside viewpoint, that this man was once responsible for the deaths of uncountable numbers during the last great genocide that the world had seen. Killers never change, though.

They adapt.

After the meeting and battery of questions that Samuel answered, he retired to the hall and was escorted to an elevator which he took alone to the upper-most floor of his hotel. Whilst alone, he turned his back to the camera situated in the upper corner of the cubical and pulled off his glasses to wipe away the grime. After he placed them back in front of his eyes, the official man pulled out a letter of black paper and blood-colored ink. It was the eighth time total that he had read over it, hoping to search for some elaborate hook or hoax in the print. There had to be something, there just had to be.

_It's nearly foolproof,_ he thought solemnly as he put it back in the inner-breast pocket of his jacket. _Whoever sent me this letter is good. They knew where I was…WHO I was. My goals, my intentions, all perfectly outline in fine print. No one knows me anymore, I made sure of that…but it can't be real…_The elevator stopped. Several men with shades and massive muscles were waiting at the top. He walked the narrow path of them and through the doors of his luxury suite. He shut the door behind him and removed his jacket on a chair, keeping the letter with him. He sat himself down on a comfy chair that overlooked the scene of the bright little city. _There is no Hell…_

Samuel's view became temporarily impeded by a descending platform outside the window. Just another round for the window cleaners, it seemed, thusly breaking his dramatic tension. The cleaning crew came more and more into view, illuminated from all sides by the lights of the room and the city. These were not regular janitors, as such janitors would not have such grotesque protrusions sticking from their backs. Drooling, fanged mouths and tumorous growths that covered their faces; horns on their arms and stumpy, hoofed legs. These were indeed not men at all, and to that Samuel shot to his feet.

One man looked normal, sitting on a chair with a top hat concealing his face in the center of the platform that came to a sudden stop. The raggedly clothed monsters went to work wiping away at the window and the human-looking man rose up slowly to come to eye level with the startled Samuel.

"Greetings, participant" the man said in a multitude of male and female voices, also one that sounded like a dog. "I am Remsius, official spokesman for this little escapade of yours." Samuel blinked and straightened himself up. He adjusted his eyes slightly, glaring analytically at his visitor.

"Escapade?" Samuel asked. "What…who are you representing?" he asked, having a deep knowledge of the affairs in business and representation. The man lifted the brim of his hat slowly, tauntingly, to reveal his face which set Samuel staggering back.

Through stitched lips and sewn-together patches of flesh, the golden eyed demon said "I represent Hell, good sir" with a bow.


	5. The Phantom and the Porn Star

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

In a dank, rustic, one-half room apartment somewhere in the rustic living district of the horrid city's downtown, a young man was completing the most annoyingly nerdy record of his still young career as a professional gamer. Seventy, yes, _SEVENTY_ straight hours of playing multi player matches online in the most played shooter game in the world. He had gone from a rank twelve to rank 341 in one sitting, grabbing sleep between matches and snacking on very minimal food.

His goal was to achieve rank 350, the highest rank, which would make him eligible to attend a tournament in several months with a fabulous new re-sellable car and vintage cosplay armor set from the game as the grand prizes. No one wanted to play with or against him because of how very nasty a person he was. Everyone lost against him and his teammates never scored a single point with him on their team. Most players would quit out mid-game, which raised his rank regardless but left him angry.

His door was also being incessantly loud during the last three hours. The doorbell was ringing off the hook and the door had dents from the constant knocking. The young zombie of a gamer shrugged it all off as the visual/audile hallucinations that had started after hour fifteen. Near the end of his now-uncountable win streak, the door opened to let in a chilly breeze along with the stepping of feet.

"Thomas!" a dry, wheezing voice shouted. "Thomas Quindale!!" The demon visiting the nearly brain dead boy was a towering mass of frilling, waving black cloth with a black void under hood and thinly-fleshed skeletal hands. It pointed dramatically at the young man from the door, nearly poking him. Tom didn't even hear him, so he shouted again. "TOOOM!" Still no response. Then the match ended and the waiting on game screen appeared. Tom closed his eyes and started snoring loudly.

"Dammit, this sucks" the phantom mused as he sat his incorporeal butt down on the floor. The door creaked shut and stopped the otherwise comforting breeze from coming into the stuffy room. "Why did I have to get stuck with this dead-end bastard? I couldn't go help save the crazy guy or the hot chick? No. 'Go reheat the coals, Mul', 'Go wake up the nerd and get him to the recon point, Mul!'. Dammit. Stupid demon bastards always pushing me arou-"

"RANK UP!!" Shouted a recorded voice. Tom had already gone back to playing, where he had ranked up in mid-match. Mul stared over and rolled his hood, as he lacked both eyes and a head. He hovered over and stuck his bony hand into the gaming machine, connecting with the network and infusing himself with the game.

Meanwhile, Thomas was still lifelessly focused within his game world. As he marched his avatar through the swamps with his deadly weapon overhead, a dark, flaming shadow rose up from the waters and evaporated them instantly, along with the other players.

"THOMAS QUINDALE!" it shouted from its form, waving a hand dramatically as the steam swirled around it furiously. Thomas's attention shifted slightly as he opened his mouth, which had been on reserved use to eat and taunt only since hour forty.

"Can't you read, retard?" He mocked through his earpiece, now glued with oil to his head. "It's 'RoninMusashi12'." The avatar pointed its gun and started shooting a stream of tiny nails that shot fast as light through the air and through the specter. Mul hovered still with outstretched arms and a low hung hood. As soon as Tom's avatar passed across his dark hand, a wave of destruction shot forth and the avatar was decimated.

Seconds later, Tom respawned and started marching forward automatically. He had spawned inside the fortress at the center of the swamp level and rushed over to the automatic turret system. After two seconds of his perfect hacking skill level, the turrets of the highest level were armed and ready to blast apart anything or anyone that tried to enter. For the close-quarters of the base, Tom equipped his weapons scattershot attachment.

The feed from one of the turrets darted around rapidly as it mowed down the charging players. Mul flew up with flowing cape, phasing through the high-power rounds and flying rockets. The last image from that feed was a close up of his open and glowing hand. Tom digitally crouch walked around each corner and had his finger ready to pull. One player staggered around the corner with torn armor and slightly on fire with two medium automatics. Tom rolled backwards and hid behind the corner, waiting for the opponent to fall into his trap-door spider strategy.

"This grows tiresome, Thomas" the deep voice echoed as the giant, fiery shadow moved into his view, holding the struggling and glitching avatar of the other player by the digital throat. "What will it take for you to stop and open your eyes?"

"My eyes are open, dickwad" Tom said tauntingly as he unloaded several ballistic rounds through the phantom and into the other player, who soon exploded into meaty chunks and a mist of blood. "Otherwise, how could I do that?" Mul sighed and clenched his hand. The player who had just been obliterated was respawned directly in front of him.

"How about this, then?" Mul started in an annoyed voice. "If I let you kill to your delight, will you stop playing this game and wake up in the real world?" At that, he teleported all the remaining players into the hall and facing the wall. The voice channel was ablaze with curiousity as to why no one could move or shoot.

"Well," Tom started as his avatar cocked his gun, "I usually like a challenge, but this time," he sheathed his gun on his back and drew out a long katana, holding it like a samurai, "I can compromise." The deal had been struck, and he went to work furiously pressing a button or two to carve apart non-existent beings on a simulation. Mul watched over him and waved his hand to summon back the players as they died.

Eight minutes later, the game ended. With no competition to get in the way of his kill count, Thomas had risen up to rank 350 and snapped out of his trance. He awoke and looked away from the screen, which had stolen his attention for so many days, to his apartment, which was fully occupied by swirling darkness. Mul hovered there and stared the boy down, assumedly, and put forth the black letter in his hand.

"Read it" the demon commanded. Thomas took one look at the letter, which looked like a burnt piece of paper with some kind of red goo all over it, then fell face forward onto his floor. The seventy-so hours without proper sleep or nutrition or looking away from a digital image had drained him of life entirely. Such is the fate of a college dropout in his prime, of course. Mul sighed heavily and snapped his corpsey finger. Three small hunchbacked gremlins came shuffling through the door and picked up the boy to haul him off. Mul stowed the letter in his cloak's empty face hole and watched his minions scatter off with the boy.

"Moron" Mul spat as he prepared to follow. "How can such a disorganized young idiot become a dignified killer?" With that, the tiny room became empty of real life as the door was slammed shut.

* * *

As one demon struggled with his chosen candidate, another searched for the woman. The castle was lacking the girl in question, but in the demon's new visit and extra piece of furniture had been added: the corpse bean bag lounge chair. The demon in question was a young, busty woman with wavy blonde hair and erotic legs. Her face was the least demonic of all the messengers, the only evil trait being her one blue eye and the other swirling with the images of Hell's greatest torments and evils. Her baby tee and short-shorts were soaked and dripping with blood and gore from the legions of servant that were rended with her bare hands.

"Such a cold little girl, leaving before I could come to get her…" the succubus mused openly. "I should follow her, but…" she took a gazing look at her surroundings, "all this stuff," and she decided that she liked it all, "I'd hate to let it go to waste." As she moved into the lush and lavish bedroom, as of yet untouched by her carnage, she snapped her finger three times and summoned three other girls.

"Hiedie, Helga and Helen" snapped the porn-star demoness as she pointed in sequence at the other three, "I have a mission for you!"

The three other girls were reflections of the bitter young souls that decided against a life that mirrored their current master's appearance. A fat Goth chick, an overly muscular athletic girl with far too much unshaven hair, and a girl with a ponytail and a plaid school uniform.

"Yes, mistress" they said synchronically.

"Our new friend has flown the proverbial coup, it seems" the mistress started in an uncharacteristically intelligent tone. "You three need to track her and get her to the right place before she decides to do something stupid."

"Like what?" asked Helen, the nerdy girl.

"Oh," the mistress started in a valley girl accent, "you know, like, flirting with the other contestants or trying to start the game early? You know, stuff like that and…stuff" Now that she had grown tired of giving her three minions instructions, she laid herself down on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

"Very well, mistress" said the jock girl. "We won't disappoint you." All three took another bow and turned out of the room, glaring along the way through their red, snake-like eyes.

After the girls left the compound and entered their demon-driven transport that was parked at the foot of the steps, they began to seethe visibly. The demon SUV driver rolled up the separator window between the front and back, letting the girls discuss their mission in private.

"That cantankerous bitch" said the nerd with glaring dagger teeth.

"Why is she ordering us around?" the Goth asked angrily. "Isn't it part of the karmic balance that we should be ordering _her_ around? Or does Satan like sluts as much as all the guys in high school…"

"We'll have our day" the jock said with menace. "One day, that bitch'll let her guard down, and then POW!" she exclaimed, pounding her fist into her open palm explosively, "we usurp her."

"Even if she is channeling our respective powers, she can't take us all on at once" the smart girl observed.

"And she can't channel all three of us at once." The goth girl submitted. "It's my power, I know how it works."

"We'll get ours, girls" the smart girls said as the others flicked their forked tongues and clicked their clawed feet. They all morphed into their hideous, demonic true forms of bulging muscle and sharp horns that protruded out everywhere. "It's a matter of time…"

The car sped off into the orange horizon towards the rustic little private airway to catch up with the spoiled young woman on route to America. Ironically, she was heading exactly where she needed to go…


	6. The unwilling Contestant, the Artist

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

In this bleak, depressing world, it isn't uncommon to find an individual who's life is nothing less than utter depression incarnate. These days, the people who lead truly trite and pitiless lives are dead from their own miserable hands, but those that live on to spread and absorb misery are those of true interest. One such example, as there are more than one at this point in the story, is that of the terrifically terrible woman Devi D.

Miss Devi, a woman reaching her mother-hood age, leads a life that would drive most to the razor blades. She works non-stop, everyday of the week, developing a children's Christian cartoon, work that makes her mentally unstable and physically sick most of the time. On top of that line of 'work', she is working on co-producing and lead-writing a major motion picture which she based on her own surreal insanity bouts from the past. On average she gets four hours of sleep, so little that she has considered giving up sleep entirely.

She still rooms with her tenacious, overly friendly friend Tenna, who always seems to be home when Devi is or isn't. Her mental and physical health hasn't deteriorated at all, driving Devi to question herself and her life even more so. The constant drudgery of day-to-day struggling with incompetent actors of multiple varieties and flawed visions coming into crystal clear view. If she shaved her head, she'd be the new Nny. All that behind us for now, let us resume the story with this miserable girl.

* * *

Devi staggered into her apartment at the dank hour of 4:00 A.M. Her half-finished paintings lined the walls of the living room, and her masterpieces were stacked against each other in her "art room", which was ajar. She continued to shamble down the hall and glanced over at her roommates open door. There was a man lying in bed next to her, looking satisfied and oddly scared as Tenna cuddled closer to him. Devi snarled softly and plopped into her bed. It wasn't Tenna's fault per say, Devi just hadn't gotten any in quite a while.

No sooner than that, she was asleep. Then it started, the main reason for her attempted insomnia: the dream. It was always a similar experience. She wore a trench coat, tight black pants, and a loose shirt with broad black-and-white stripes. She was always waiting at a bus stop in the middle of a barren desert for a bus that never came. She forcibly endured the straight hours of conscious dreaming with the only activity that she could, painting.

She reached down into her coat pocket, and predictably, there was a brush with fresh ink on it. She sighed and started painting lack-lusterly in the air. It started out as a self-portrait, but quickly degenerated into some hideous demonic form with huge jagged teeth and wide, evil eyes. Another sigh. Without a watch or measure of time in this godless dream world, she wondered just how long she had been here.

Devi stood up and started walking down the beaten path. The tire tracks in the dry, dead earth went on forever over the flat plain of cracked death. No plants or clouds or even stars; just a dim moon to light her path. The dream made no sense to her, and its repetition baffled her psychologist even more so. A meaningless dream that forced her out of sleep, a wasteland that carried on forever, the growing chirping of crickets in the distance…

"Wait," Devi said curiously. "Crickets?" she turned around to face a single insect in the road. It was no cricket, but a cockroach that chirped hungrily. Even an immortal thing like that had troubles surviving in this place. "That's new" she narrated, "this could be a breakthrough for me. What could a cockroach symbolize?" She paced over and knelt down to stare at the new bug. It twitched its antennae about rather randomly and turned around in place. It rubbed its legs together and chirped right at Devi. She smiled and stood back up.

A moaning came from behind her this time. She pursed her lips and cocked an eyebrow as she turned around. Zombies. Now it was an endless field of zombies with half-melted faces and tattered clothes. It had been months since the last time her dreams didn't make sense, and she was actually amused. Noticing that the zombies were shambling closer and starting to moan louder, she took a step backwards.

"Oof" she grunted as she backed into something else. Her eyes widened with shock as she felt the material of another being's clothes. She wanted to turn around, but fear had paralyzed her. She stared down the zombies, who were coming in closer and glaring with growing hatred and hunger. "Shit…" Devi cursed frightened.

_What now?_

All at once, as if from some arcane communicator linked directly to her mind, Devi heard something talking without a voice. It was a hollow feeling of acknowledgment of a language that she didn't understand. It was like someone took a needle and shot information directly into her brain. She let her mouth drop and her eyes widen to their physical limits, then slowly, _very _slowly, turned around.

Now there was nothing again but the cockroach. The zombies were gone and whatever, or whoever, had been there was gone now.

_A girl?_

Again with that horrible feeling of brain-rape. Devi covered her ears and darted her head around in every feasible direction. The sky was still barren, the horizon was still infinite, the cockroach was still right there.

"Who the fuck's there?" she shouted out angrily. She glared back and forth with a scowl, but nothing was there to meet her glare. She lowered her hands and started walking back toward the opposite direction where the bench was. If she was going to be confused, she wasn't going to be standing the whole damn time.

_Who else?_

This time, it was loud and heavy enough to floor Devi. She stopped herself on her hands and spit on the ground. The overwhelming vertigo left her in a state of shock that she couldn't shake free of. It was like someone was holding her down.

_Roll tape!_

No side effects this time, just stillness. The scenery started changing, though. The sky became mixed with bloody clouds of black smoke and odd patterns that swirled about rapidly as if to form something on the opposite horizon. Devi gathered her mental and psychological strength to attempt to roll herself around and watch the other direction. She failed and landed on her side, limp as a rag doll, and vomited. She felt a strange darkness creeping up on her that she couldn't stir from, but moved her eyes away from her puddle of puke long enough to see someone else.

_This is fate, ……, Fate unavoidable._

A name was said, she was sure, but it wasn't part of what she understood. Everything became very cold and dark for only a moment, then she woke up. Devi opened her eyes to a clock hanging from the wall and scattered canvases on the floor.

* * *

"Ugh…" she moaned as she rose. "What the fuck was that?" she leaned and pushed herself against the wall with her hand which she jerked back when it came into contact with a hard object. She darted over and saw the light switch, turned on to a dark room just barely illuminated by the early morning sunlight.

This wasn't her bedroom, as there was no bed. Only her gallery of paintings, many of which had fallen from their hangars and were face-down on the floor. She glanced around to see if anything was out of place or missing, then stopped upon one important detail: the canvas in use. She put up a blank canvas two nights previously but never found the time to fill it out, and now it was freshly painted.

She shambled over and stared at it dreamily, terrified. It was a scenery of sorts. A lone human outline staring down a sky filled with screaming black clouds against a blood red sky. Between those two was a hill, atop which was a pillar, and on wither side of the pillar stood six figures in robes. One of normal build, one muscular, and one a busty woman on one side; a very tall one with huge white eyes, one with no hood, and one with horns of some sort one the other.

"Holy shit" Devi said in awe at great length. The door of her art room flew open and Tenna stalked in wearing a tank-top and panties.

"Devi?" she said amazed, having not seen her friend and tenant for quite a while. "Devi! You're awake!" Tenna skipped over and gave the shock still woman a hug, then stepped back and leaned over to check her face. Mouth hanging open, eyes wide and buggy, shoulders slumped. Tenna took a look at this latest piece of work and picked it off the easel. Devi snapped out of her trance and watched her friend reach up to hang the picture on the wall. Tenna turned her head back around and looked seriously for a second at Devi, who was still rather scared.

"'Scuse me" Tenna said as she moved over to the door. "Post-sex potty time." Devi stared scowling at the door and decided to walk back out of the room and onto the sofa. She laid herself down and reached over to unplug her phone.

"Fuck work today…" Devi said victoriously as she flipped on the T.V. and kicked off her pants. "I'm to tired from sleeping to go to work" she smirked and watched the news of the latest tragic suicide attempts made by some stupid high-schoolers. Tenna walked back into the main living room sprawled herself over a reclining chair pleasently.

"If you're not working today we may as well go out and try to get laid, right?" Tanna asked the ceiling. Devi chuckled deviously as she continued to channel surf.

"Once every 24 hours not enough for you?" Devi tiredly. Tenna looked over with a feigning anger. She picked up her Spooky doll and threw it at Devi's head. It bounced off and both girls enjoyed a good chuckle.

"That must've been a good dream to get you to stay home so easily." Tenna mused. "What was it about?"

"Don't know" Devi answered as she yawned and started drifting off. "I think I might have died, though…"

"Oh," Tenna replied, "…cool."


	7. tym 4 skoolz dawg :P

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

"Todd!" Called out a charming voice in singsong. "Wake up!" Todd, up in his undecorated room adjacent the prince of all darkness, stirred reluctantly in his sleep. The first real bed he had slept in for years and school had to be the thing to move him out of it. Not an interesting prospect to move one in the morning. "Todd!"

"I'm up!" Todd called out. He warily rose up to his feet and stretched his arms out at the window.

"Do want a piece of toast with your eggs, Todd?" Mrs. Satan sweetly shouted again. Todd thought for a moment as he reached for his shirt and decided after several years of _only_ toast, he could do without it.

"No, thank you." Todd shouted back as he changed. "I'll be down in a minute."

"Alright!" was the woman's response. Once Todd had changed from his jamies to his school-appropriate apparel, he shambled over to the door. The carpet in his room felt even nicer between his toes, as it usually did after the months and years he went between hard plastic and squishy cushion floors.

"I hope this school isn't another zombie-orgy like elementary," Todd mused carefully, "or the crazy-boy schools where you couldn't hear over the kids climbing on the ceiling…" Finally, he went to open his door to the hallway. "Well, at least I'll have a friend to--"

"_Buenos Dias, Hermano"_ growled Pepito. He was leaning against the door at an angle that allowed him to stare straight at Squee through the dark shade of his own brow. The effect was chilling to a point, for any normal person, but having seen Pepito at every conceivable angle before (once even inside out), Todd just smiled.

"Morning, Pepito" he greeted. Without hesitation, the Anti-Christ brought his hand down in a twirling, hammer-swing motion and swiped it swiftly across Squee's face. The whole thing was to quick to warrant a reaction from Squee, but he noticed something different. He was now wearing some kind of strange, fur hat with horns awkwardly protruding upwards.

"Listen up, bro" Pepito started as he wrapped his arm around Squee's shoulder and moved in close. "I've already spread the word about your arrival at school, but you're the Chupacabra, so you'll have to come into the room screaming bloody murder and try to eat someone if you can. Got it?" Squee blinked once and stared forward with an unmoving, extremely confused face.

"What?" he said at length. "Also, Chupacabras eat goats, right?"

"Not the Canadian ones!" Pepito shouted back. He retreated for the stairs and slid down the guardrail. "Remember: Cannibalistic!" He drew his hands up to his face and made a demonically funny look as he vanished down the steps. Squee continued to stare for a moment, when the hat was mysteriously lifted from his head.

"Wendigo" said the sultry darkness behind him. Squee turned astonished to see his new father, Satan himself, holding the horned wig in his bony hand and looking down. "Canada has no Chupacabra, only Wendigos. Go on downstairs and have your breakfast, child." Squee nodded with a smile and went casually to the kitchen. Satan smiled after him and thought for a moment how good his life may one day become…his, not Squee's.

* * *

The boys proceeded out the door and down the street to the bus stop, where a group of other youths had already gathered. They were dressed poorly in baggy pants and undershirts with wool caps and incorrectly worn visors on their heads. They had all huddled around something on the ground and were mocking it audibly from a distance.

"Ignore these termites" Pepito said to Squee as they approached. "They enjoy tormenting things which cannot defend against them…like small animals and children."

"Jerks" Squee retorted.

"Wiggers, really" Pepito corrected. "They think they're black and act like rappers. Ironic that they think rappers are tough when they can't even sing." As the boys came to a stop in front of the bus sign, the 'gang members' stood up and started circling them.

"Oh, now what's this shit?" One boy said in a heavily fake black accent. "Little Ms. Pointy-Boots brought her boyfriend to visit!"

"Yeah, yeah," taunted the other. "What'chu girls gon' do? Have a little tea party?"

"Hey, Horns!" one taller nerd shouted, "we just got off the line with our boy Jamal in the state! He said when he get out he gon' kill yo ass!" Pepito slowly gazed over at the grammatically retarded young man through his fiery eyes. Squee just stood silently and watched to learn how one deals with problematic people at this school.

"Oh, so?" Pepito lethargically retorted. He shot out his arm, grabbed the punk by the face and squeezed until his skull cracked open and blood started gushing out. "Well, I'll be waiting." He let the body drop down, with Squee now staring fiercely ahead with utterly blank eyes. In the wake of the violence he had to experience while hospitalized, Squee had learned to void his mind and dull his senses until the event had passed.

The boys flocked over and picked up their debilitated comrade, who was miraculously still alive, somehow. "You'll die for this, Peppy! DIE!" Pepito shooed them away with his hand as the scurried off with the groaning boy resetting his skull bones in place and pushing the blood back in.

"My father has forbidden me from actually killing anyone at school" Pepito explained to the zoned-put Squee, "so I just suppress the actual death spirits and give them pain. Anything I do to these dicks can't kill them, just hurt like all fuck…are you awake?"

"Yeah," Squee said at length. "I heard something about not killing people. You could've told me that earlier."

"Yeah," Pepito growled, "and you could've worn that hat I gave you! Some Chupacabra you are…"

A short silence followed until the big, yellow bus finally rolled up and hissed to a stop.

"Wendigo, actually." Squee said as he boarded. Pepito hissed behind him angrily and followed.

* * *

"The far back seat is mine" Pepito said to Squee. As they walked down the narrow hall to the back, all eyes were intently averted away from the boys. Everyone was trying hard to keep their vision focused outside without making any noise. Squee couldn't help but think about what kind of reputation Pepito had here. Finally, they arrived at the farthest back seat, a long one stretched across the back that blocked the emergency exit.

"Go on and sit," Pepito said happily. He himself lounged deeply so his head was resting and his feet were far out into the aisle. Squee sat down cautiously, half-expecting something to pop out and tie him down. He looked over at his demonic brother, who seemed to be peacefully relaxing in what looked like a very uncomfortable position.

"_Hola_" squealed a new, girly voice from nowhere. Squee darted his head around to catch the glimpse of a mysterious figure about to tackle him with flashing fangs.

"Down, girl" Pepito commanded. The girl dropped to her knees on the seat, still staring down Squee. She had translucently pale skin painted with black makeup across her lips and around her eyes. She was wearing a short-cut, gothic-lolita style dress with abundant frills and lace, metal spikes and buckles and black-leather stiletto heel boots. Something one would expect from any given friend of the Devil's son, a super Goth.

"HI!" she shouted. "Who're you?" Squee just sat there, paralyzed, and wheezed out a few vowels.

"He's my brother. Be nice to him and don't eat him." Pepito said sternly. The girl sat gently next to Squee and straightened out the wrinkles in her dress.

"I'm Lena, short for Lexenne Aria Vladim" she said politely in a valley girl accent.

"She's a vampire," Pepito interrupted, "if you were wondering" Todd shook off his shock and extended his hand haltingly in greeting.

"H-hi. I'm Todd" he said frightened. She took his hand, brought it up to her face and kissed it. First, Todd was curious, then bashful, and then creeped out when she started licking her lips.

"Hello, Todd" she replied seductively. "You taste delicious." Todd shook for a moment and scooted over closer to his brother-in-law. "You sure I can't have just a taste of him, Peppy?"

"Yes" Pepito snarled, "and don't call me that. It's not a term of endearment." Todd felt uncomfortable. He felt like he was coming between something that these two had established beforehand, like he had broken into their own secretive society without proper initiation.

"Don't worry then, Todd" she said sweetly. "If Pepito doesn't want me to eat you, I won't eat you. And if you're really his brother then you're more than welcome to hang with us! We're the most popular kids at school!" To this, the tension was lifted from Todd's shoulders, and he felt calm again.

"Don't listen to **it**, _hermano_" Pepito said lowly. "Fear and Popularity aren't the same thing. But if someone does mess with you…" he paused to resituate himself and stare Todd at eye level to continue with "…just tell me" and finish with a nefarious, sharp-toothed smile.

* * *

The bus screeched to its halting stop in front of the horrific building. The students all shambled out onto the curb and marched onward through the filthy air onto the school ground proper. The last to exit were Pepito, Lena and Todd. Lena had an umbrella at the ready once she stepped down and opened it up before the sun could incinerate her. Pepito reached into his pocket and pulled out a pen-marked cigarette with an evil smiley-face emblem. He pulled out a stick and lit it in his mouth. With a mouthful of smoke, he turned around and wisped out a smoky call.

"Squee! Come on! You'll be late!" Todd stepped warily across the paved walkway littered with trash and debris to his friends. He took a long, almost angry look up at the sign. A testament to his earlier torment, a beacon of just what this place was doing to its youth. Under the heavy amounts of graffiti and explicit images in multiple colors, the stone lettering read:

**HI SKOOL**

Todd gave a heavy sigh and continued forward. Today would be but the first of many disappointing days he would have here, so this one shouldn't be made worse by his own sour attitude. Best make the best of it…for now.


	8. The Account of the Gathering of Killers

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

The private jet touched down on the city's fair runway with a screech. Colored pink with a black stripe across the middle with lime green tinted windows. It was a rolling feminine atrocity. Once its speed was low enough, the pilot started to taxi the rather large plane into a commercial port at the terminal.

"I want out NOW!" screeched a horrible banshee from the rear of the plane to the pilots in the front.

"We need clearance first or they'll arrest you, your highness." Responded the pilot.

"They wouldn't dare!" Growled the girl. "They'd better know what would happen if I got harmed in this country…" The entirety of the girl's jet, except the cramped cockpit, was occupied by her own personal room in which no one else was to step. Pink shag carpet that lined from the floor to the ceiling.

The rear-most section had a gigantic waterbed-cushion littered with antique items and relics from the world over. These were packed by her highness's decree as target practice so she wouldn't be so rusty after the flight. Disgustingly girly items and furniture bordered every other end of the plane, including several plasma-screen televisions that were all tuned in to some food channel.

"If anyone disobeys me here, I'll launch a missile and level this city" she sweetly said with an innocent smile. The pilots allowed the radio tower and terminal security to listen to that message before sending their request to board into the terminal. Their access was granted immediately.

* * *

It was noon in the city. In the center of the business district lied a rundown, abandoned building due for immediate demolition. A limousine pulled up in front of it to the dismay of the onlooking miscreants and wannabe writers typing away at the coffeehouse across the street. Out of the escorted car stepped a tall, muscular man in a hooded coat with a shovel in hand. As soon as he was on the sidewalk, the door slammed shut and the car sped off, leaving the smiling man to walk into the building alone.

"As I have seen" Mort mumbled to himself, running his hand across the corroded surface of the door to the tiny shack. "This is where my visions always end. This is an ethereal place where all destinies come together and diverge!" The excitement was building in him. The thought of fulfilling his unknown prophecies sent chills up and down his body. He had to hunch over to keep from leaning back and howling like a wolf in glee.

"Let us walk the beaten path," he whispered as he slipped on his gloves and stood erect, "and emerge from the Forest of Shadows as gods!" He reached up to his forehead and lowered his black goggles over his sun-parched face. Taking position, he stood with one far back from the door and arms pressed down on his forward facing leg. He twisted around and kicked the door to pieces, then proceeded inside, much to the astonishment of the gawking poets and drama nerds across the street. Many of them took out their notepads and started writing the random origin stories that popped into their heads.

A few minutes later, another limo pulled up and departed just as quickly as the first. The passenger of this car was a rather normal looking man with slicked back black hair and slightly spiked-out bangs. Below the hair, he wore ovular glasses that seemed almost opaque with haze. Everything he beheld was reflected perfectly off the surface of his glasses, and he beheld a busted door. With a sigh, he walked slowly forward and proceeded into the building.

It was an utter wreck inside. The walls were stained with watermarks from pipes that had long ago been broken. What was left of the floorboards was rotten and deteriorated. Under the flooring was the solid concrete foundation that kept the whole of the structure standing. Some of the piping was visible through the holes in the wall and the sun shone through the cracks in the ceiling.

"This is a proper rendezvous point?" Samuel questioned. "How…appropriate." He started walking, trying to keep his footing on the still standing pieces of wood. "A demonic gathering, just a Remsius mentioned. This would be the only place an actual demon would see as fitting, having never set foot inside a courtroom before." As he made his way through the rotted halls, he peeked his head into whatever room he could find to see if anyone was here already and waiting.

_The demon said to look for a door in an unusual place to find the meeting room proper_ Samuel remembered. _What would an out-of-place door look like here? A new one, or perhaps one placed at an impossible place? Who knows…this whole thing was probably just a stint to begin with. I very well may end up getting held hostage for some reason and have to--_

And at the end of the hallway maze he had walked up until now, was a door. It didn't look new, or impossibly built, or odd in the slightest, but it was open to a pure white room. Samuel stopped for a second to take in the curious sight, then pressed on forward, though still curious and cautious. The light consumed him as he stalked his way through the archway.

* * *

Samuel stood in a dazed state. The unkempt building walls and halls had left now. There was a pure white room of equal-length square tiles on the floor and walls with a perfectly flat ceiling adorned with a single light that burned like the sun. Everything had a shining white light cast on it. In the room sat four chairs, one of which was occupied by a sleeping young man in filthy clothes. Another man, very tall and dark with ornately designed clothing, was feeling his way around the room.

The chairs all faced a single, huge panel on the wall, which Samuel assumed was some sort of screen. He straightened his tie and walked slowly over to the closest chair. Upon sitting, he noticed the chair itself to be facing slightly away from the screen and was set a little farther away than the one next to it. Regardless, Samuel adjusted his seat and patiently sat while the tall man behind him continued to examine the walls.

"It feels strange," said the rumbling voice from behind. Samuel cocked his eyes to the side in attention. "There is no air from the outside world in this room. It's like this place exists where no earthly form can enter unless by will…curious that my fate has brought me to such an impossible place."

"So I take it you're here to take the crown?" Samuel asked. Mort turned around to the new face and nodded.

"It was long predestined that I was to come here" Mort replied. "What lies around the corner from here, I cannot safely say."

"I suppose it's the same with him" Samuel mused.

"The child?" Mort clarified as he walked back. He sat next to Samuel in his seat and spread out his legs, which reached near to Sam's chair. "He was here before I, so I cannot say why exactly he is here. If this is the meeting place for the both of us, I can only assume that his destiny called for him to ascend with us…"

"…right" Sam said sarcastically. All the talk of fate and destiny from a strange man was making him uncomfortable. Several minutes of silence passed without even movement occurring between the two gentlemen. Eventually, the young man woke up with a loud groan.

"Whatafug…" he mumbled still half dead. "Where am I?" He darted his head around to view the overly bright room and nearly shut his eyes. "Where am I?"

"Somewhere," Mort started, "between life and death."

"Didn't you get a letter?" Samuel asked, leaning over to inspect the young man. His eyes finally adjusted and opened to see the two other men next to him. He blinked curiously at them.

"Letter? When?" he asked.

"Only a day or so ago." Mort answered.

"Well then, there you go" he said very childishly. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his leg. "I was to busy the last few days to check anything. A big ghost told me something, but I was probably hallucinating…" Samuel looked at him with judgmental eyes under his opaque frames, but shrugged off his obvious question. After a few more moments of silence, the huge panel started to flicker on and the room dimmed down. Now it was a dark gray color with the still bright white screen on the wall.

* * *

"Greetings!" announced a voice from the screen. All three men turned their attention to it at once. The voice was familiar to Samuel, the voice of the demon that had accosted him here. "I am glad that you're all here according to schedual." Everyone looked over a the still empty chair. Samuel stood up and was about to point it out, but got cut off. "Now them we'd like to explain the rules while we have your attention."

"Excuse me!" Samuel shouted.

"Yes, sir?" Remsius replied.

"Someone is still absent." There was a long silence on the other end with the occasional shuffling of papers and clicking noises.

"Can you guys see me?" Remsius asked in his many voices. Mort and Tom both shook their heads. "Guys? How many of you are there?"

"I think your video is broken" Tom pointed out.

"Really?" Form the other end, the three men could hear the demon leave the room and start yelling in some incomprehensible language to someone else. The door opened, slammed, and the video finally started working again. Remsius' horrid, stitched face and rainbow-of-gray hair was displayed in a room just as white as the audience's. "Ah, now it works! Samuel, Mort and Thomas are all here, but where is the other?"

"What other?" Tom yelled.

"The girl, Dutchess Yvonne Mhilikahn." Remsius held up a portrait picture of a pristine looking young woman in lolita décor. Tom smiled at the prospect of meeting a hotty like that, Mort ignored the information as useless and Sam looked over at the door, still open.

"No girl is here" Sam said at length. He sat back down and let the demon continue.

"Right, well," Remsius started, "I'm sure she'll turn up somewhere. We'll just review all the rules when she arrives. Now then, here is how this is going to work: upon entering this room, you have all signed an unwritten contract with Satan himself that your bodies and souls are of Hell's property from now on. All four of you will be working together to exterminate some troublesome beings here on Earth, and at the end we will crown our King based on your effort and skill displayed."

"Judging will be handled by Satan himself during each major trial. There is never a time limit for each mission. We will summon you formally before any mission. Each mission will take place in this city, and none of you are permitted to leave it until the competition is over. You may use whatever tools you have at your disposal to complete these tasks. Any other rules that need to be brought up will be revealed at the proper time. Any questions?"

All hands went up.

"Bow down, Peasants!" a girl's voice called from the door. Through the beckoning light stepped Yvonne, the missing contender. Her apparel spoke well enough for her personality, with so many frills and bows and laces on a short-cut gown with visibly latched pink stockings. Pink nails, sparkling knee-high pink boots, and a low cut pink leather corset that overly accentuated her already large breasts. Tom was drooling.

"Your Queen has arrived!" She looked over the stark room of men and then at the screen showing the mutilated zombie-man. "Ew! There's some kind of icky stupid movie playing!"

"Right, well," Remsius started, "Let's just go over the rules once more, okay?" Sam groaned and rubbed between his eyes. Mort lowered his hand and crossed his arms in a huff. Tom skipped over to the girl.

"Charmed, milady" he greeted with a low bow. Yvonne tilted her wrist at her side and raised up the boy's chin with her blood-stained bat.

"Of course you are, boy" she responded snotily.

"Please just sit down!" Sam yelled.

"How dare you raise your voice to me!" she shouted back.

"Quite stalling our destinies!" Mort yelled out.

"Don't yell at the hot girl!" Tom exclaimed.

While the four argued over their own triviality, Remsius shook his head with embarrassment. "These are the closest humans we could find to _him!?_" Upon watching the spectacle, Remsius pushed a button on the panel and the door slammed shut. The bulb illuminating the room blew out and the only light came from the screen.

"Do I have your attention yet?" Remsius asked. Everyone turned and looked at the screen dubiously. "Good. Now then, let's start again…"

And so it began. The contestants gathered, the stage set, the rules deliberated and the first target chosen…for the next night.


	9. Welcome to the Show

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

The circus is in town, such a pleasant time. Colorful clowns and delicious, deadly foodstuffs. Overpriced tickets to the wonderful, fun-derful center ring performances of people doing inhuman acrobatics and death-defying tricks. But on this night, death shan't be defied, as the stage has been set for the true performance of a lifetime: a lifetime that would very soon end.

Backstage, in the most spacious of the closet-sized dressing rooms, dwelt Squeegee the Clown, entertainer to the world over. Born in Ukraine and making laughs for others ever since, this odd man was the first on the devil's hitlist. His unusual gift of humor and happiness in such a horridly shitty world was the product of his father's own greed. In selling the soul of his unborn child, his father was blessed with a child that would become famous and bring his family great wealth. The catch, as the devil usually throws one in on a deal like this, was that the child would never meet his father due to 'domestic abuse' issues that arose early on.

Now, Squeegee is aware of his fate and has come prepared to face the fickle forces of destiny that conspire against him. He has guns, knives, magical tricks and a whole puffy sleeve full of death. Surprises awaited under every seat of the full stadium. Triggers on every inch of his pale skin under his ridiculously puffy, polka-dotted clothes. An arsenal of weapons, worth praise of an army, all readied to kill four strangers.

He remembered what the demon had said previously. That horrible demon with two faces and four arms, like a pagan statue from some place unheard of.

There are four. One is short and always has glasses, with eyes that gleam venomously into the darkness. One is tall and black as his own heart with eyes that can dim the sun. One is a shorter man of common grounding stature but with a marvelous killing instinct. And the last that will approach you is…well a slut. She'll be with the other three and she's the one with boobs…They're here to claim the devil's dues, you soul. If you wish to live, they must die.

"If I kill them" he said in his gruff, street voice, then they'll have to die…" He got up before finishing, leaving the last word for dramatic effect. He took a short injector filled with a hazy substance stuck himself in the neck, and finished in a maniacally helium-induced voice with widening eyes and a yellow smile that spoke "LAUGHING!" He let out a terrible, yet appropriately clown-like laugh that became higher in pitch with each terrible chuckle. The lions that overheard his devilish giggle.

* * *

Outside, in the fairgrounds, the killers were moving into place. Samuel came incognito with an unusual outfit from his ordinary attire; A Hawaiian shirt and uncouth shorts, with sunglasses over his normal glasses. His gun, a modified 'hand-cannon' made of pure-grade silver with bullets that can piece solid steel, rested comfortably against his bosom beneath the ruffling, patterned shirt. He sipped patiently from his Jumbo Slurpee while waiting for word of the show's opening, and the clown's closing.

Mort had sneaked around back and started his job early, killing several clowns until destiny brought him a corpse similar to his own dimensions. Clad in his clown-wear with his destiny-made attire ready to slip on and shovel in tow, he entered the main tent under a gilded mist of perfect disguise. "It was destiny that brought me here…" Mort said through gritted teeth. "…a destiny that I shall curse forever!" With his piece angrily said, he began to apply his makeup.

Thomas and Yvonne decided against subterfuge or stealth and went for the direct route, as per Tom's suggestion. They would take up the illusion of a dating young couple and enter through the front gate, then attack the target when ready. Until then, Tom was taking every available opportunity to cop as many feels as possible. This most current one takes place on the Ferris wheel.

"Tell me," Yvonne started in a peeved voice, "Do you want to never use that hand again? If it comes anywhere my chest again, you _will_ loose it."

"Chill, babe" Tom said smoothly. "I'm just trying to stay low profile. You see, here in America, guys usually get to feel up their dates when they take 'em places. We need to look like a real couple, okay?" His hand reached around her back, over her shoulder and made another pass at her hefty hung sweater meat. She slapped his hand away at the last moment.

"No" she snapped. "Aren't you anticipating this upcoming mission at all?" she asked.

"Well, yeah" he replied, "but I have experience in planning at the final countdown. That's how a real warrior plans anyway…" This time, with the mood refocused on combat, he rested his hand dangerously high up on her leg. Considering the length of the shorts she was wearing, he wouldn't have to do much work to get in them either way he went now.

"Is that true?" she asked, calmly picking his hand off her lap and tossing it like trash back at him. "I'm just eager to see the body we get to mutilate." Her tone went from a sweet yet annoyed girl to that of a vicious killer. "What flesh we can rend apart, the bones we can break. The nerves we can agitate and all the pain to be delivered…WHOOO!! This is the feeling that brings me to life!" Her legs started kicking spasmodically and her smiled reflected that of a monster against the pale lights of the fair. If he hadn't been so turned on by her, Thomas would've forced himself out by now.

"And it brings me to life too!" Tom yelled, holding Yvonne tight by her waist. She coiled her arms around his neck and moved in close with her demonic grin. Tom responded with a toothy sneer of his own. In the insanity of the moment, Yvonne abandoned her humanity and lunged into Tom's face, loudly moaning in his mouth for the entirety of the ride. Tom shot a fist up in the arm as soon as their tongues connected.

Samuel had observed enough of the carnal idiocy to be disgusted by it and walked away with a stick of thick, pink cotton candy in hand. He adjusted his glasses and walked over to the Big Tent. Peppermint red-and-white stripes that seemed to climb into the clouds, guarded by two even more cliché guards bearing serious faces above their goofy uniforms and Spiderman face paint. Undaunted, Samuel took a lick of his spun sugar and started inside the massive cloth structure anyway. He was stopped by a large hand connected to a thick arm.

"Where you going?" shouted the gruff man. Sam pointed inside with the candy held innocently to his face. "The show ain't started yet!"

"Yeah," his partner retorted, "the show ain't started yet."

"You can't go in without a ticket" the first said again, leaning in closer.

"Can't git in wit no ticket, yeah" repeated the second.

"You got a ticket?"

"Tic-ke-TUH!?" the last syllable delivered some spit into Sam's candy, which he had noticed and eyed over for a second before discarding entirely.

"Where can I purchase a ticket for the show?" Samuel asked sincerely. The guards drew back and the first cleared his throat.

"You may purchase them here, sir, for only 15 per person" he said, as if reading off notes printed inside his glasses. "With this ticket, you also get a raffle number in the sweepstakes, which gives you a chance to win a fabulous prize."

"Also with the purchase" continued the other in a much more well spoken manner, "you can receive unlimited free snacks while inside from the roaming vendors in the crowd. This ticket is good for as long as the event is in your location, but will expire when the locale has changed." During the spitting of information by the second, the first guard had already clipped and prepared a ticket. Sam paused for a moment to take in the whole of the scene before slipping some money from his shorts pocket and handing it to the man.

"Thank you sir, enjoy" the tall guard said authoritatively. Sam nodded, took his ticket and entered the tent. The two guards acted as precious, like they were statues, until the second picked up the cotton candy and took a bite out of the clean side.

* * *

Backstage, Squeegee had rounded up the clowns for pre-show inspection and last minute preparation. He paced in front of them like a drill sergeant, glaring each one down with a horrific eye. Mort was passed over many times as just another huge, black man in makeup that wanted to be a clown. As tortured as he was by the method, it was working.

"Alright, you clowns!" Squeegee said in his authoritatively helium voice. "Tonight is the first night of the circus! The house will be packed to the brim with happy idiots with no lives or happiness of their own. It's our job to make them laugh and make them laugh hard. If you stumble or move out of place for a carefully coordinated act, you will be punished. If they laugh, you will be praised. Do your job as best you can, and hope that they laugh…cause if they don't," he closed in to another clown's face, almost making the poor guy's makeup run off in cold sweat, "it'll be bad for you"

Mort glanced down at the startled man, then back up and straight-ahead. _What an odd union these morons have. A totalitarian control by means of a painted mascot for the wasted lives of thousands of people. It's like an analogy for the world itself…only with bigger shoes._ Mort was about to move out with his clowny brethren when he caught sight of something disturbing. In a dark corner of the already dark backstage, a mysterious figure seemed to be crawling out of the tent wall.

He blinked, and the apparition was gone. Shaking the experience off, he continued over to a mark on the floor, ready to run out and start acting like a moron at a moment's notice.

The time was nearly 9 o'clock now. The show was just about to start. Thomas and Yvonne moved their way up to the front of the crowd of people with money ready. From the read marks on Tom's face along with Yvonne's homicidal demeanor, it would seem that whatever moment they had had been ruined shortly before. They got their tickets and proceeded inside. Sam had taken his seat far up in the bleachers, ready to act as soon as his target was in plain view. Tom and Yvonne sat in the front row, as close to the rings as they could. The whole time, Yvonne kept a tight hand on her hidden weapon, as did Tom. His free hand was kept around Yvonne, much to her displeasure.

With a fiery bang of pyrotechnics, the center ring became shrouded with a curtain of gray smoke. The smoke vanished in swirls, dissipating into the air and rising up out of the tent like steam to reveal a single, round man standing in the center ring. He wore a stereotypical ringleader outfit, complete with long, curling mustache and top hat. Whipping up his head and a megaphone in hand, he made his dramatic introductory entrance.

"Welcome, welcome, one and all, to our grand affair! Tonight, we promise you a show the lies of which you will see nowhere else!" At that note, Sam, Tom and Yvonne grinned nefariously. "May I present to you, our opening act!"

* * *

"Oh, Damn!" Satan cursed. He glanced at his pocket watch in the cab he had squeezed into and scowled. "Start speeding!" he said to the driver.

"Sorry mac" the fat man replied, "but this tub don't rush for nobody." Satan grunted. With a snap of his fingers, the driver combusted and was replaced instantly with a demon sporting a caved-in head and exposed teeth. "Hurry! We'll miss the opening ceremonies at this rate." Without a sound of confirmation, the cab shot up to highway speeds, carelessly swerving between other cars and streetlights in the city street.

_This is the first step_ Satan thought to himself. _There may not be any tests necessary if this one goes well enough._ After a long screech of the tires, the car came to a stop. Satan stepped out, a block away from the fairgrounds, and he floated away from the flaming cab and its disfigured driver. The pale, white moon was full, directly over the circus tent, acting like some kind of deadly cosmic beacon. Tonight, the circus would leave town, one way or another…who would leave with it?


	10. Ladies and Gentlemen!

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

"And now, entering stage left, are the juggling Fire Brothers!" the ringmaster declared from his safe podium in center stage. From the his right entered a huge man on a unicycle juggling three smaller men, who in turn were juggling sticks of fire. The audience roared with appreciation, except for two. Sam was patiently calculating his moves while Yvonne was just plainly uninterested. Tom, however, was making a day of each act.

"HOLY SHIT!" Tom exclaimed. "That was amazing! Wasn't that amazing!?" he shouted into Yvonne's ear. She yanked him down by the belt and slammed him onto his chair.

"Focus, you Yankee cock-brain!" she growled through gritted teeth. Tom reeled his neck back and clamped his mouth shut. "We have to watch for our target! This is no time to be distracted." Tom quickly nodded and folded his hands in his seat. While Yvonne wasn't watching, he was able to slip his hand around the small of her back and grab her waist. Thankfully, she was to occupied with observing the entrances for movement.

Samuel was as generally neutral towards the events as his female competitor but even more analytical. His eyes were flitting under his tinted glasses and his hand was fixed steadily on his jumbo orange drink. He took occasional sips and glanced around for the fourth of their brigade, the giant black man with the occult attire. Where he was, Sam didn't know, and he intended to find out before mobilizing. A few acts later, the ringleader stepped down unexplained.

The audience gave out their own utterances of confusion and distress, until the entire house-lights went down. After a few seconds of darkness, several spotlights came on and started erratically circling around. Yvonne was clutched onto Tom's arm for a moment before snapping off and holding herself.

"Woah" Tom explained, "that's what I'm talking about."

"Shut it" Yvonne snapped back. "I'm afraid of blackouts, okay? That was incidental." Over their arguing, the booming voice of the ringleader from off-stage rang out through the tent.

"And now, ladies and gentlemen. This is it! The greatest moment of your lives! All the way from Europe, returning to us from his monumentally successful tour of hilarity and joy, we present our star!" The audience roared. People were standing up and squealing uncontrollably, like a whole legion of brainless devotees. Sam sank in his seat and withdrew out of disgust.

"Here! Is! SQUEEGEE THE CLOWN!!" After the roaring enthusiasm, the house lights went back up and a single, tiny car swerved its way out from stage right and into the center ring. Yvonne tensed herself and slowly stood up. Tom followed her lead in equal viciousness in his face. The tiny car came to a stop, and all was silent. Then, an explosion of colorful smoke from the ring! Out of the car emerged a fleet of bouncing clowns, one-by-one, each easily twice the size of the car they were in. Then, the spotlights led up to the trapeze, where a single clown stood upon the tightrope with a tiny, comical umbrella in hand. He honked his nose and raised a microphone to his mouth.

"Hi, everybody!" he said in a helium-produced voice. His very voice invoked the loudest of cheering, loud enough that it forced Yvonne back into her seat in agony, covering her ears. Tom, on the other hand, was used to loud noise in his ears, and thusly just stared with a cracking smile at one of the clowns; a huge, black clown wearing comical overalls that nearly didn't fit him. Tom started chuckling. Yvonne looked up and saw his laughing face, forcing her to anger. She kicked him and he sat back down as if cued.

"What the fuck's so funny?" Yvonne snarled. As Squeegee descended impossibly slowly through the air, Mort stood underneath ready to catch him should something go wrong. Tom pointed to the entirety of the entrance and Yvonne groaned. "Well, that's one way to get close to your enemy" she observed.

"HEY MORT!" Tom yelled. "YOU LOOK GOOD IN PURPLE!" Yvonne finally got tired of him and left without correcting his behavior. Mort had heard him and glanced in his direction with a shiftless face. As Yvonne strutted her way out of the main seating area and effectively out of the tent, two clowns pinned her by the arms and started dragging her to the center ring.

"LET ME GO!" Yvonne shouted as she struggled against the unusually strong freaks.

"No worries, ma'am" one clown whispered. "We'll compensate you for this if you just play along."

"I don't need compensation" she protested still "I need you to get off me!" Regardless to her protest, the audience cheered for her as she was worked into a bamboo cage that was locked behind her. Tom was becoming distressed at this point.

"Hey" he said quietly as he sank back into his seat. "Why'd they do that?" Panic started to set in, which meant Thomas' intestines were cramping rapidly. The noise started to slowly deafen, as if he had been submerged in a pool of thick pudding and his face flushed instantly with sweat. Mort watched him sprint off as he carried a large, gag saw over to Squeegee who was standing in front of the cage.

* * *

"For my first trick this evening, I shall saw this beautiful young girl into pieces!" he announced to his loyal fans. They went wild as their clown master-apparent measured the blade seriously and draped a large tarp over the cage itself. Yvonne started to shiver, as the confined space and darkness had triggered her phobic reaction of complete, catatonic breakdown. She sank down like a rag-doll and assumed a rocking fetal position, trying her hardest to concentrate on the single sliver of light from the ruffles of the tarp.

"Please try to keep in mind that this ground is just that: solid ground, and that girl is still in there!" Squeegee explained. The audience was sitting on the edges of their seats, with the exception of Satan, who was standing in the highest rafter where the light's were broken. "Also keep in mind that this is _not_ a real saw!" At the press of a button, the saw started revving violently, becoming a chain-saw of extreme force. With a sadistic grin, Squeegee started ripping through the tarp and stalks as if they weren't there at all. Yvonne was still a terrified lump on the ground, and therefore dodged all the potential blows that would have otherwise landed and killed her.

_Fate has conspired against you_ Mort thought in Yvonne's respect as he stared on at the horror. _I can only assume your death was swift and painless...and bloodless? _Mort noticed that each nasty rip produced no blood. Squeegee stopped in time to hear the last cries of concern from the stands and waited for the dust to clear. His plan was to kill her for real, but he failed.

Once the light was visible again, Yvonne recomposed herself and shot upright from the ground with arms stretched out to the sky and a beaming smile. The crowd roared again as the buxom girl bowed deeply in all directions. While Squeegee slowly backed away with a nefarious glare under his bright painted smile, Yvonne gave an evil smirk to Mort as she once again bowed in that direction. Mort nodded, strode over to his current boss and raised his arm up, stopping him from proceeding.

"You've seen it here, folks!" Mort shouted out with his booming voice. "Mr. Squeegee the Clown has allowed this fine young woman to effectively defy death! The Harbinger of Joy has struck yet again!" Although the high-grade vernacular of the speech only completely reached a few ears, the audience cheered anyway and started chanting their current obsession's name.

'Squeegee! Squeegee! Squeegee!' Though not a rare occurrence for the professional fool, he still jerked away his hand and waved on in all his goofy modesty.

"Thanks for the save" Squeegee whispered up to his mammoth helper.

"No problem, sir" Mort lowed back with a smile that warped his painted frown. Mort was smiling in a much more dastardly way within his heart, as he watched several clowns carry Yvonne back into the stands. Mort also saw, from the corner of his eye, a huge, hooded figure melding into the fabric of the tent beside an unusual gentleman in the highest stands. It was gone as soon as he looked, much like the previous illusion, but his gaze was now fixed on the other demonic figure, with huge ram horns and glowing eyes on an emaciated face.

Samuel was saying a quick, personal mantra before loading his gun and straightening his tie. He was now back in his formal wear and ready to stain it with blood from the bathroom when he heard a loud groaning in the stall next to him.

"Sick already, Thomas?" Sam chided. Tom gripped the bars of the handicap stall and relaxed his face to breath.

"Pressure, dude" he explained. "This happens to me all the time. I just take a huge shit and it all goes away."

"How symbolic" Sam said sarcastically as he left his stall. The large, plastic restroom was empty without the two killers, an oddity in Sam's eyes as the circus hadn't given anyone a chance to do their business for the past few hours. After a flush, distressing gargle, and half-flush later, Tom exited his stall in ridiculous ninja gear. A martial-arts Gi with torn off sleeves to reveal his oddly defined arms. His hands were wrapped in athletic tape and he had at least four swords of varying lengths and types on his person. Sam also noticed what looked like an Uzi at his hip.

"It's not Halloween" Sam chided. Tom scoffed and splashed his face with water, pushing his hair back and letting it spike up.

"No" Tom said, trying to sound tough as he raised the flexible ninja-suit over his mouth. "It's killing time!" He moved like quicksilver out of the bathroom, leaving Sam to chuckle to himself and dry off his hands.

"He'll definitely die tonight." Sam decided jokingly.

* * *

Squeegee had made his way comically to the opposite side of the ring and started climbing up the ladder to the trapeze. "You've all been such a nice audience tonight that I want to make it up to you!" he said. A wave of cooing and sympathy washed over the crowd, forcing Yvonne away from apparent sickness of the place. She marched on back to where Tom had gone and disappeared in the darkness. "So now, I'll leave you all with one last trick that will make not only your days, but your entire years! You will speak of it for decades, even!" He posed triumphantly at the top of the wire as his clowny minions entertained below. Mort sniffed in the air and picked up on some imperceptive illness about the place.

"Feast your eyes on the center ring!" Squeegee commanded. At his signal, the lights again dimmed and the spotlights shone down as the clowns hastily retreated from the radius. Squeegee threw down a small ball which exploded into a colorful palette of smoke and noise when it hit the ground. At that time, Mort was already half-way up the ladder to the pillar across from the nefarious grinning clown master. Squeegee, unseen by the distracted crowd, withdrew his hand into his puffy sleeve and pulled out a remote. He pressed a button with a skull, and the myriad of vents hissed out a violent, green gas onto every seat in the tent.

Mort watched through the noxious smoke as bodies started grinning to the points where their gums were stretched and their lips tore open. Eyes were rolling backwards and mout started overflowing with blood.

_Biochemical weapons!_ Mort quickly realized. He took a sweaty arm to his face and wiped away all the makeup with a snarl. The clowns were quickly retreating away from the gas as it spilled over into the ringed floors. Squeegee's complexion went from fake and scary to just plain scary as his makeup started cracking and flaking off like a shell. Under that shell was a monster of black and green, with a spiked nose and vicious, yellow rows of fangs streaked across a blood-red smile. His eyes, horrible as they were before, became yellow and his pupils dilated to show a double-ringed iris with a golden haze.

Mort was able to see the full carnal shift from atop the post and he smiled. Then he frowned. "Oh, shit. All my stuff's in the back room...dammit!" His curse provoked the attention of the heretic clown, as Squeegee turned his hideous, nightmarish face slowly to his left and stare down the giant man. "...Shit" Mort repeated.

* * *

"You okay in there?" Tom yelled into the ladies room where Yvonne was changing.

"Yes!" She screeched back. "Just don't talk to me, worm!" Tom sighed and took a step back.

"Women, eh?" he said to Sam. Sam just stared ahead at the crawling cloud of green that came down the hall.

"Oh, I'd imagine so" Sam replied randomly as he and Tom started to back away. From the ladies restroom, Yvonne cried out to them as they left sprinting out the tent.

"Can one of you come in here and tighten my corset?"

They were long gone...


	11. You've Seen, and Seeing is Believing

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Within the irradiated tent that leaked with toxic fumes, Mort stood up top at a pillar facing the demon clown Squeegee, who had just biologically assaulted the entire circus and possibly the county around it. Even with his daunting physique, Mort was shaken to his core with fright. Be that as it may, he still had a job to do, a destiny to fulfill, and he would regardless of what hell-spawned makeup wearing man was staring him down.

"You're a sick fiend, Squeegee" Mort remarked across the air, glancing over to his side to re-analyze just how stupid he sounded saying that. To that, Squeegee let out a demented, distorted laugh that refused to break his hideous smile.

"Am I?" the clown said in many voices at once. "Or are you the truly sick man, hunting down an innocent clown on request from the Devil?"

"It is destiny that you must die" Mort explained. "I take little pleasure in taking a good man's life, but I see no men here anymore. Just a demon." Mort's maliciously serious tone only made it harder for Squeegee to not fall off his rafter with hideous laughter.

"Whoever said I was a good man?" Squeegee said between his laughs. Mort's face twisted very sternly, his brow furrowing and mouth scowling. In his silent anger, he didn't notice the presence behind him, as a few clowns were gasping their way up the ladder to escape the gaseous death below.

"Have you not provided the world over with joy?" Mort inquired. "Have you not given your better life to entertain the peoples of the world for no expense? Those are truly the traits of a good man."

"Than you don't know, do you?" Squeegee replied. "I don't do that shit out of charity..." Squeegee paused to see from across the way the clowns that had saved themselves were slowly climbing up. Squeegee squinted his eyes and moved suddenly, throwing up his hand with a toy horn equipped. Mort's eyes shot up and he jumped, grabbing desperate hold of the tent fabric above him. Squeegee honked the horn, which fired out a small dart that sliced through the air and into the neck of one clown. He felt the pain, tried to scream, but didn't move at all.

"Buggles!" his comrade shouted from the ladder. "Are you okay?" Buggles didn't respond. He looked down, with wide eyes and a face-tearing grin, chuckling breathlessly. Then, after a moment, he burst out in a fit of mad laughter. Still laughing, he stood up and moved over to the ladder, leaning dangerously over the edge and over his friends.

"...Laughter is what keeps me alive!" Squeegee finished. Mort looked over to see the hysterical clown fall down and grab onto one of the clowns, who tried desperately to reattach himself to the ladder as they both went plummeting into the green cloud. Once they were gone, the crack and splatter of bone-to-ground was heard. Squeegee drew back his arms and crossed them, looking up menacingly at Mort who dropped back down to the creaking wooden platform. Mort in turn tilted his head up and looked down past his deadly frown at the stubby killer across from the trapeze.

Still unseen by either person, Satan sat in a cloudless area of the stands and ate delicious, buttery popcorn.

* * *

The miasma was spreading, consuming even more of the fair-goers outside that were too stupid to run. So, everyone but Samuel and Thomas was dying or dead. Although it seemed dangerous at first glance, Sam and Tom had taken a defensive position by scaling the roller coaster and sitting at the top-most rail. As they waited out from the cloud to thin, Sam was making some important observations regarding the thick mist and noting them on a recording device. In the background, screaming laughs could be heard.

"Victims suffer from apparent madness immediately" he noted into his recorder. "Symptoms erupt from skin contact as well as inhalation. Physical symptoms include a total numbness of the face and a violent tearing of the muscles from smiling and laughing. In rare cases, usually in obese victims, the eyes bulge and pop out of the head. Total paralysis follows, during which the victims are asphyxiated from airway stress..."

"Are you done babbling yet?" Tom blurted from atop the coaster track. "We need to get back in there and save the big guy!" Tom was overly excited about his mission, posing erratically with his sword like the nerd he really was.

"What about Yvonne?" Sam said after he clicked off his recorder.

"She's already dead" Tom said. "Plus, I don't think she would've put out anyway." Tom's callousness actually made Sam turn to him, but only for a second. He was about to go back to observing the massacre when something caught his senses, something he knew was bad. The chains on the roller coaster, which should have been dormant, were now beginning to click, meaning it had been activated down below. Sam shifted his eyes until they saw the cart, a long sixteen person cart, wheeling slowly up the tracks of the first hill, and trailing the green death within it.

"Fuck!" Sam shouted. He grabbed the rail above him and flipped up effortlessly beside Tom, then started sprinting down the track.

"That was cool!" Tom shouted. Of course, moments behind Sam's thought process, Tom now picked up the sound of the clicking tracks and looked over to see the disease-carrying cart rolling down the tracks in the distance. Tom summoned his strength, took in a deep breath and started sprinting after Sam with a loud "FUUUUUCK!!"

"Hey!" Sam shouted between his winded breaths. Tom caught up to him as they raced down an impossible angle and shouted back.

"What!?"

"Use your sword...to cut the tracks!" Sam yelled. Tom looked ahead blankly, then skidded to a stop along the metal rail of the wooden coaster and posed with his legs far apart and his hand supporting his body. He took a firm grip of the sword on his back and took two heavy swings as he continued backwards. He twirled the blade in his hand, posed like a ninja, and sheathed it. At the cling of metal, the wooden supports collapsed and the metal fell, leaving a gapping hole in the track. It was just in time, as the cart was just now ascending to the top of the hill. Tom turned with a smirk to see what Sam thought of his move, hoping to see an open mouth, but Sam was still running away.

"Wait up!" Tom shouted, jogging onward without fear of the approaching cart. He could hear the deep rumble of the cart as it descended into the pit he had carved, and he knew what was next. After the abrupt silence, a huge crash of metal and wood into the ground below. Tom looked back, if not to gloat to himself, but his face became plastered with fear as he saw a huge cloud of the green death rising up from the ground following the crash. Tom kept his pace mechanically, but as the cloud approached his mind overrode his legs and he picked himself back to a violent sprint at once. At the crest of yet another hill, Sam paused and panted with dismay on his face.

_Goddammit_ he thought, looking over the clearing fog. _This is far worse than I imagined..._ Out in the fair grounds, the bodies were moving. Their skin tinted green, their teeth rotten yellow, some with bulging-huge eyes and many with only holes, but all of them moving towards the tent. Trails of blood were everywhere, concession stands were overturned or on fire; it was a zombie riot down there. Sam pulled out his recorder and made a late entry.

"After prolonged exposure, the corpses of the victims gain zombie-like qualities, including movement beyond the frame of mental activity..." he tucked the recorder back into his pocket after making his entry, then went back to panting as Tom hastily panicked his way to the top of the hill.

"Dude" he said, breathing heavily and rapidly, "what do we do?" Sam waited until he breath was caught, and attempted to answer, but nothing would form in his mouth.

"Attention, fuck-heads!" Yvonne's voice called over the static of the announcement system. "If one of you doesn't get over here to tighten my corset, I'll see to it that you're all skinned alive!" The PA crackled off, and both men shared a confused look.

* * *

Mort heard a crash, an explosion, and now the voice of the girl but shrugged them all off. His mind demanded focus from his surroundings to try to read his opponents moves as he and Squeegee were locked in an areal battle on the high wire. Squeegee stabbed with venom-coated knives, Mort weaved and dodged with the grace of a boxing devil. When he made the attempt to land a blow with his powerful fists, he would always hit a shield of some kind beneath the clown's puffy robe. To that defense, Mort's hands were torn and bloody already, and his vision was tortured by the constant glances down that led him into dangerous vertigo.

"I'll make you smile so hard," Squeegee taunted, "you're momma's face will hurt!" Another stab, another far lean back. Mort scowled and grabbed Squeegee by the wrist. He twisted, heard the clown's groan of pain and watched the knife descend into the clearing mist. Then, he took his chance, and landed a magnificent, powerful blow to Squeegee's face!

Yellow shrapnel shot out from Squeegee's teeth, followed by translucent liquid as he stumbled and crimson spit as he fell. Everything slowed down for Mort, who stood smiling on the wire, until Squeegee made one last nefarious grab at freedom, clutching Mort by the ankle and forcing him down with him. Mort staggered helplessly as he fell, but made his own desperate save and grabbed the razor-thin wire, digging into his hand and forcing out some blood. Below, he heard the squeaky laugh of his opponent.

"Let's hope you're hand's as tough as you will!" Squeege taunted. He drew out another knife, this one clean, from his sleeve and made for a stab. Mort reeled up his heavy leg and kicked the clown square in the eyes with his other. Squeegee didn't wince, or even blink at the pain, so Mort repeated it ceaselessly.

In the stands, Satan continued to watch, taking a sip from his delicious Grapey Fizz drink as Mort got stabbed in the calf and started a freefall.


	12. Let Me Hear It! Ladies and Gentlemen!

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

As if this carnal little showcase of nightmares clad in circus robes wasn't bad enough, now we have a zombie epidemic. Our anti-heroes are separated but alive, each one with murder on their minds but of particularly different people. Satan observed quietly with his own cartel of demonic soldiers at the ready and willing, and the entire debacle was being covered flawlessly by the surrounding military blockade, as orchestrated by the prince of darkness himself. But even the sheer force and ballistic charm of the admirable undead-at-arms couldn't fight back the continuous scourge of infectious zombies that charged forth. And so the fight continues under the evil big top.

* * *

Mort did the only thing he could think of to save himself from the inevitable plummet into the green gas of death that still lingered below. He summoned his strength, pulled up his legs, and stomped down onto Squeegee's face as they both hit the ground hard. The force sent a shivering crack up his shin's but Mort didn't care. The mist had cleared just enough for him to dash over and climb his way back up while his clowny opponent lay with a maliciously warped, unconscious face.

From the backstage, zombies came out into the mist with their arms flailing around and screaming ecstatic screams from their mutated grins. Mort ignored them and took a flying leap up to the center post, grabbing it in a bear-hug grip as he started to shimmy up. Squeegee stood back up, his face having reset with his original grin from ear to ear, now with some rather sharp holes in the teeth. His eyes were no longer bulging out crazily, but his brow kept them in a deep shade of malice as he looked up at the scaling giant that floored him.

"Oh no" Squeegee growled demoniacally. "You don't get away from me in _my_ tent!" Squeegee extended his arm and a rope flew out that was aimed for Mort's neck. In response, Mort's instincts ordered him to dodge and dodge he did, straight up. He continued to climb, unaware of the soft hissing that rope made as it climbed up after now in the form of a hideous snake.

"Goddamn" Mort cursed as he flipped back onto the platform. He sat down and checked his wounds, which were all bleeding a good bit. His legs burnt and felt like they would snap at any second. Not only that, but now he did notice the snake that was coiling up onto the platform and he crawled back. Just as bad, the zombies were climbing up the ladder from far below and Squeegee had already mounted up on the opposite trapeze platform with his twisted grin of death. Mort groaned loudly. First, he kicked the snake's head off, then he stomped off the last few spokes in the ladder built into the beam, buying himself precious seconds as he heard the stretching of trapeze wires. He looked over, and Squeegee was dangling back and forth with his eyes locked on Mort, brandishing hand scythes.

"Fuck!" Mort cursed.

* * *

Left and right, with phenomenal strength, Yvonne was braining zombies with her bat like they were nothing as they lurched over to the PA stand. The mist had sunk low enough that it was barely and island that she stood on, with rotted, peeling pieces of wood from where the disease had spread. Of the thousands of participants in the fairgrounds ,currently, most of them were there, charging at her, and getting their brains literally beaten out.

"Where the fucking piss are you holes!?" she screamed through the microphone. A distance away, Sam and Tom were hopping along the aerated tops of the shacks and stands not yet destroyed mysteriously from the roller coaster over to her.

"Ain't she cute?" Tom said lovingly and sarcastically. He snickered, while Sam only groaned and kept ahead of him. Soon, Yvonne could see them as they ran over across the air, Samuel landing atop the stand first and Tom diving into Yvonne second.

"You idiot" she said, looking down at Tom whose face was deeply buried in her bosom. "You'll even die trying in vain, won't you?" she growled as she picked him up by his hair. He was smiling like an idiot with his mouth open and tongue just barely in, eyes nearly bulging out at Yvonne's precious semi-exposed breasts. His focus was intense enough for him to leave the very loud moaning of zombies behind him go unnoticed, so Yvonne stabbed with her bat and splattered one zombie's head against another.

"For a second" Tom started, "I went to heaven."

"Well don't worry" Sam yelled from above. "If this keeps up you'll be dead in not too long, and maybe you'll go back." Tom refocused himself and hopped off of Yvonne. He saw the zombies lurching onward from the tent, he saw the buxom girl fighting them off, and his eyes drifted downward as he watched her. As a zombie neared him, much to Yvonne's apathy, his inner killer instincts from years of online multiplayer gaming kicked in, and he blindly cut the afflicted one in two down the middle. Yvonne saw him, as did the other conscious dead, and their grins turned to frowns as the last of the green sank from the air into the dead and dying ground.

"Points to win:" Tom said mechanically, "150. Current team points..." the zombies exchanged gazes warily before charging and shrieking. Tom drew out his Uzi and sheathed his sword in one motion and started mowing down the zombies one per shot. After the clip and battlefield were empty, he reloaded and finished, tallying an approximate "...149. Proceed to boss level." Unconsciously, he charged. His body knew what to do, but the blood from his brain had all drained out to his groin leaving him on automatic game-inspired pilot. Yvonne was impressed as she watched him fearlessly jog onward with his gun up, bitting her nails with excitement. Sam had watched, just watched, the whole thing.

"So that's why he's here..." Sam said thoughtfully. He threw away his doubts, pulled out his large handgun and landed in a crouch with his head down. He stood back up, brushed himself off, and started walking on into the tent with Yvonne coming up behind him. She sped past him while Sam just looked around curiously. Bodies to the left, bodies to the right, bodies slumped over counters and concession stands...bodies packed into port-a-potties. Sam decided to make a final note before walking into the unknown of the tent.

"Before major symptoms of zombification, victims on the outer ring of effect suffered from explosive and horrific diarrhea..." He stopped his recorder and stowed it again, then shuddered at the thought of such a hideous final bowel movement. "What a maniacal disease this is..."

* * *

With a giant thud, Mort hit the ground and blasted up the dust. The green mist still lingered in the tent, most of it having seeped down through the cracks in the exposed ground, but the corners against the bleachers still had a damp little haze of it. Mort did his best to move carefully, knowing that his huge body would easily stir up the mist if he ran across the open area. Squeegee didn't care, and was hoping his baggy form would stir up the mist and keep his injured pray closer to the ground that he'd like. Mort limped over to the backstage area, while Squeegee was skipping along to catch up with his hand-scythes ready.

"Run run, gingerbread man!" Squeegee taunted. "I'll catch you and eat you, no matter how fast you are!" Mort angrily grimaced and continued limping quickly backstage. As he neared the black shadows, something caught his eyes, something horrible. Whatever it was in its compact form, it had vanished, but the feeling of its presence lingered. Mort's body continued regardless, but Squeegee had seen it as well, much closer than Mort did and his grin was flipped.

"What the fuck! What was that _thing_ doing here!?" the clown yelled to himself. At this time, Tom charged in and acquired a lock on his target. Aiming down the sights of his gun, he fired off short bursts and hit his mark, sending Squeegee to recoil back and duck behind the main beam of the tent. "And now there's another one here?" Squeegee growled, his grin returning. Mort was gone in the darkness, but now two more fighters were present. The girl from earlier, the one Squeegee tried to kill, was charging at him with a bloody baseball bat ready to swing.

"Time to die, make-up man!" Yvonne shrieked. Squeegee withdrew his hand into his baggy sleeve, and just as Yvonne was ready to descend with her own horrid force, the clown threw out a giant blanket that covered most of the ground and swirled up the mist around the lower corners of the ring. Yvonne's face went pale, as the blanket closed in on her and slammed her to the ground. She thrashed about furiously, trying to get free, but the claustrophobic surrounding soon soaked in, and Yvonne started screaming fearfully.

"Aw, the little girl's afraid of tight spaces, is she?" Squeegee taunted. Tom kept shooting in his controlled streams and bursts as he drew closer, so Squeegee turned to face him. His tough, demonic hide was barely scratched by the weak gun's bullets, but his weapons remained undamaged. The clown pulled out a comical horn and gave it a honk, sending a huge echoing scream of torment and anguish roaring across the infected plains of the fair grounds. Tom fell flat, his brain fully shut down from the psychotic weapon. Squeegee smiled victoriously, although it was the same smile as before, until his head encountered a loud, disgusting clang from the shovel of his other opponent.

"I have read the stars" Mort began as he let the clown tumble across the ground. When he stopped, the fabric beneath him ripped up and Yvonne rose up clutching her loose corset to her partially exposed boobs with a murderous excitement glaring from her face. "They have told me leagues of information..." and then Tom slouched back up, his normal consciousness reigniting, and he drew out his blade. Squeegee started backing away towards the stands. "...and they have shared with me your fate..." Squeegee continued back until a hard metal stopped him. At his back, aiming straight and true through his head, was Samuel with his hideous gun.

"You will die, Squeegee" Mort said as he closed in. "You will die..." to that, Squeegee started to laugh. In all darkness, this clown's greatest threat was being taken as a joke. Everyone continued to close in regardless, and Sam kept his finger ready to pull the trigger.

"I might die" Squeegee admitted between his laughs. "BUT NOT FROM YOU FUCKS!" he bent his arm back inversely and sprayed mace at Samuel, who just shrugged it away and jumped back to wipe his glasses off. The other three charged. "As long as I'm in this tent..." Squeegee began, dodging the attempted blows of the three fighters, "...I'm immortal!" Mort snarled at this revelation, but kept smashing away anyway. He connected the blunt and blade sides of his shovel to the clown's face, Yvonne hammered him across back and broke his legs in every direction, and even Tom's blade connected and carved deep into him. None of their damage kept. With his glasses properly polished off, Sam could see that.

"It's like cutting a rock with a plastic knife!" Tom said. Squeegee put his thumb in his mouth an blew, blowing his hand up like a cartoon, then punched Tom into the main support pole. He was still conscious, but the cracks that his chest made prevented him from getting back up to fight for now. Squeegee's arm deflated quickly, releasing a blast of air into the ground. Facing Yvonne, he puller out a board with a bloody nail in it and matched her fevered swings, one for one. Mort tried to charge, but his legs wouldn't carry him. He ended up on the ground, standing only by the grace his shovel granted him. He looked over at Sam, who was sitting casually in the bleachers with his gun still in hand, but laxly pointed downward.

"It's your fate to fight as well" Mort yelled over. Sam didn't acknowledge him. "Whatever reason you have for pacifism I can argue against! This is not man we fight, but a monster! All of us are trying as hard as we can, but only all of us at once can succeed." Sam looked over behind his opaque glasses and watched as Mort's face became icy and serious. "...help us." he pleaded. Yvonne went flying by and skidded across the ground on her back. Her corset slipped off and she used her bat to shield the naughtier bits of her exposed breasts as the clown closed in. Sam stood up, straightened his glasses and aimed down the sights of his gun. Even Satan jumped at the thunderous boom that roared out from Sam's gun, and Squeegee stopped to watch the better half of his torso splatter in front of him as a nice, cool mist. His scream was so loud, so painful, all the demonic guards on the perimeter cringed terribly.

"What the fook was that!?" one militant guard yelled.

"It sounded like a chicken giving birth to a moose" another said.

* * *

The clown had finally stopped breathing. Only his upper half was left, with a profuse of blood pouring out onto the dead ground. The mist was gone, and the sewers were imploded and caved in so the green death wouldn't spread out across the city. Sam sat calmly in the front row, Mort leaned against the wall nursing his wounds. Tom had passed out a while ago. Yvonne was wincing and whining in some foreign language as she stared meanly at her tiny wounds. Satan descended from the rafters at last.

"Enjoy the show?" Sam asked.

"Indeed. It had everything" Satan responded. Mort glanced over, unaware that the dark prince had been watching. "Flashy effects, drama, clowns and blood! It truly was the greatest show on Earth." Satan reappeared in center ring, and the house lights somehow spot-lit him. Everyone was moved to where Sam was, and they were all perfectly fine. What damage they had incurred was gone, and Tom was awake.

"As you all know, this was a test" Satan began as his demonic entourage gathered around him. "This man had defied all of Hell, and he has been thusly punished. What will become of him is unknown to myself, but I'm sure it won't be good..." Two demons began gathering up what was left of the psychotic clown and walked it out in a box. The mortals watched the sordid affair before Satan began speaking again. "I would like to congratulate you all on passing this test with flying colors!"

"Really?" Sam asked.

"BOOYAH!" Tom cheered, oblivious to the broadness that the news hit. Satan waited for silence until he continued.

"Of course, you can't all be given such a demanding title, so I do hope you won't hate me if I tell you that there are many, many more hits that I have outstanding for you to take care of..." Silence. Glaring, fiery, hateful silence. Regardless of the seething looks he was being given, Satan smiled and continued. "Worry not, for I have faith. In the end, all but one of you shall be dead, and my King will be chosen." Yvonne humphed loudly, hoping Satan would take her cue and add a 'Queen' to his speech, but he disappeared in a pillar of black, swirling doom and the lights went back down. More silence and seething followed.

"What bunk" Yvonne growled as she started hotly outside. Mort followed in silence, but was brushed past by Tom, who followed after Yvonne like a puppy.

"So, where're you staying?" Tom asked, making a move to wrap his arm around her. She elbowed him off guard and kicked him into the wall. Mort ignored the children and just kept forward. Sam was still sitting in the bleachers, staring off into nothingness in the dark tent. In the glinted mirror of his glasses, something stared back.

"How goes it?" some demon on the ground asked.

"Well enough" Sam responded. A pause followed, then Sam straightened his tie and went to leave.

"I'm expecting a report soon from you, F" Sam ordered.

"Oh, you'll get it" the short demon said. The lights flickered and shorted out, sending a short hail of glistening bits of light down on the demon who's torso was carved with the word 'FUCK'...then he disappeared.


	13. In Center Ring, the Star of the Show!

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

In a city far away from the region our killers run through, a young woman walks down the street in the evening. She is alone, against her better judgment, and attempting to adjust to the modern fad of not using a car to get from place to place in a city. So far, it was a half-block and closing. All she had to do was stick out her gait for the remaining short while so she could rendezvous with her friends at the club. Unfortunately, this pretty young woman had attracted the attention of some social amoebas, those high-school drop outs who hung on to their dreams of athletic stardom with no consequence five years too long. They had developed an eye over those five years, however, for fresh young woman that couldn't wriggle away from four men at once.

"Hey there, cutey" one sleazed as he oozed in close to her from the bushes. She moved away from him, ignoring his obvious intentions, but bumped into his friend.

"What's happeneeeen?" he said, lashing his pierced tongue on his extended vernacular. Again, she moved to center away from both young men and started walking faster.

"Going somewhere?" a creepy young man said from the inclining sidewalk. As the woman hastily approached a small, narrow bridge her skin started to crawl. She kept a hand ready to reach into her bag at the first sign of trouble and pull out her mace. Three thuggish men were leaning against the walls of the tunnel, watching her walk by. Then one blocked her path. She turned around in a panic to see that she was trapped and tried for her mace.

"Hey!" one man said, delivering a firm right hand to her face, knocking her purse away. The woman tried to recover and grab at her purse, but the men were quick. Two held down her arms while one lanky, disgusting young vagrant started unzipping his pants in front of her. "Settle down, sweety" he said in a charmingly psychotic way. "We're gonna have some fuuun tonight!" The men all chuckled evilly as their apparent leader moved in, but the woman wasn't defenseless. She taught the dirty man the meaning of pain by delivering a pointed heel to his groin and throwing him backwards. His friends laughed and held the struggling woman down even harder.

"Help!" she shouted. "Ra-" before she could get her full definition of assault out the men gagged her with a wadded cloth. On top of that torture, the man she kicked got his retribution with a kick to her gut. She stopped groaning from panic and started groaning in pain.

"You little bitch!" the dirty man said, moving in close to her face. "We're trying to be nice, and you kick me in the nuts!?" She tried for it again, but the men holding her down stepped on her legs to prevent her from kicking again. She lashed about wrathfully and held her eyes shut tight, not wanting to see what was about to happen to her.

Now, it bares mentioning that people are complex creatures, but they are creatures. They survive best in a pack, each one helping to finish the jobs the others start without complaint. A society is essentially a huge, loose pack with an unconscious mentality as to what goes where and how things happen. From the smallest groups to the largest, everyone survives better in a group than alone. However, there are still those that find it easier and more practical to go out into the world on their own and surpass the expectations of those who flock together for the common goal of prosperity. These are the wizened beings among we human creatures. Those who can survive and outdo us on the minimal resources that the packs leave behind in their wake. This is one such case of humanity which has prompted the most change throughout the universe.

"Who the hell are you?" the brute-like man said to the approaching individual. The other man, back to the light, ignored him and kept walking with his head up and a large cup in hand. "Hey! Punk!" Now the other villains picked up on their guards shouting and abandoned their attempted rape to see what was going on. "Why don't you just move along faggot and pretend you didn't-"

"Are you a light sleeper?" the man asked with a maniacal grin. These thugs had dealt with these valiant punks before. Often times, some random man would rush in and try to snatch glory for himself by attempting a rescue of the damsel in current distress. Unfortunately, those men never lived well enough to report the gang to the proper authorities, resulting in the rape and subsequent abduction of twelve young women in the past. All in the name of this nameless band of morons. However, this newcomer to the 'shining prince' roll was different, for never before had the gang watched a knife slice ever-so cleanly through a human's skull before without phasing its wielder a bit.

"Sleep well" the mystery man said, fingering the long knife with his bony fingers wrapped in deadly black leather. The men all looked in horror, but only two of them stayed to try and fight for vengeance. "Heh. You guys smell bad" he mocked. "And you're in my way..." He sat his plastic jug down on the elevated stone wall beside the sidewalk and drew another knife out from nowhere. "...I claimed that canvas already." The men ignored their assassin's threat and drew out their knives while the young woman de-gagged herself and started crawling away. She made the calculated mistake, however, of looking back to watch.

* * *

"I don't know who you are-" one thug exclaimed.

"No, you don't!" the assailant said, twirling his blades around with his fingers. "Hell, even I barely know who I am! HEE-hehehehehe-HA!" he laughed psychotically, leaning back and letting his wide grin show in the street-light. The other men were frozen in fear for a minute too late as the cackling crazy psycho started to approach.

"F-" one shouted, blindly lunging forward, "FUCK YOU!" The skinny killer dodged effortlessly, like a plastic bag dodges a mack truck, then stuck a knife in his throat. It was like the wind from the bag made the mack truck flip over and spontaneously-combust, killing everyone on the road. The killer turned slowly to the remaining standing thug, pulling out the hooked knife from his friend's neck as he did. The gangster wet his pants there and then as he watched his death descend on him with a hard, down stab to the forehead.

The woman watched and listened to the sickening splatter of brains and blood on the concrete roan in abysmal terror. She couldn't move, she wasn't breathing and her bladder was on the edge of total release. The skinny man in the trench coat walked over the bodies he made and retrieved his delicious drink from the ledge, sipping it slowly as he walked back into the tunnel. He took a glance down at the woman, just a passing one, and turned to the graffiti-scrawled wall.

"I told them" he said. "I claimed this canvas for myself about a year or two ago." He softly chuckled to himself, stowing his knives underneath his coat. The woman just shook violently in response. "See? Right here." He pointed to a spot on the wall that the woman couldn't quite see, somewhere near the bottom. "Well, it doesn't matter. I should start before more of those guys come along." He reached into his pocket and looked over at the woman, who was still there. "You can go" he said. "Run back to your pack, little rat." The woman disregarded his insult and broke out in a sprint, going through the tunnel behind the man's back and down the street to her preset destination with a story that no one would ever believe. She took a quick look back, just a quick one, and saw that man talking to the now decapitated head of one of the men he had just killed, holding it by the greasy unwashed hair. That made her run even faster.

"In this life" the man prosed as he dropped the head and recovered several wet brushes, "there is no joy in work." He took one brush between each of his fingers and slashed away, leaving colorful wounds that loudly painted over the inane street signs. "We work only to cause ourselves pain, because work is done for money, and money always leads to pain." He continued to hack away at the wall with his brushes. Each stroke took a curved path that split apart from its brother brushes, forming intriguing shapes and silhouettes.

"That's why I took no joy in killing" he continued to himself. The final glimmers of the setting sun shone through the tunnel and quickly faded away, giving the artist but a glance in time to appreciate what he had drawn before he continued to draw some more. "But, I love to create, which is why I quit that job. No rule is a rule without exceptions they say..." His brushes dripping with the dark colors they were dipped in now in his relaxed hands, the artist started away. "...well I say 'Fuck you'."

As he walked away, sipping from his wondrous mega-chug of Cherry Freezee, the artist didn't halt or slow down at all to look back. He knew what he made was perfect, as perfect as his stick-like arms could feverishly scrawl upon a public wall that only ever harbored obscenities before. It was as perfect as his fragile mind would allow him to remain within the definition he had written for such things; perfection as in what mankind will never see. He hoped someone would see it, though, all that paint otherwise wasted and the bodies never to be found...

"Shit" he said, turning over his plastic container. "Now I don't have anything to drink. If I don't get at least a half-pound of sugar a day my mind starts making up things for me to see...damn. Now I have to rob another store with a knife for snacks" he lamented, stepping into the light. His black hair dampened the light that was shining down on his head. His eyes half-open with thick shades of black underneath from years without sleep. His angular nose pointed straight ahead, much like his metal-plated, goat-hoof boots. A homeless man saw him and thought his shirt belonged to a deranged escaped convict from the fifties with the broad stripes of black-and-white above tattered black pants that hugged his sickly-skinny frame.

"Well" Johnny started, straightening his coat collar and pulling out his favorite knives that bared the emblems of his own twisted smile as hand guards, "I guess I'll go find a store." And so the ultimate anti-hero went cackling off into the night, followed far behind by his morality, his humanity, his hate and his regret in the for of the sun that sank into the hills. Closer still behind him was a cockroach that fluttered after him like a hungry cat following a fat man that leaked with gooey food.

* * *

And so the ultimate anti-hero emerged back into the night with a freshly procured and bloody Giant-Gulpee of Cherry Fizzle that was pried from a dead man's hands. The police wouldn't arrive until their cars were able to start, and that wouldn't happen until Johnny couldn't be found. He took a happy little walk through the empty streets with full knowledge of his diplomatic immunity with all living things as he drank his delicious drink.

"How now, Nny" a sultry, French voice said from an alley that he passed. Nny leaned back and saw a figure with a flowing robe taking a drag from a cigarette. "Are you not going to finish those witnesses?" she asked. Nny looked down the street where two panicked youngsters were shouting to each other in the parking lot of the store where he just killed the clerk in lukewarm blood.

"Meh" he said neutrally, "something good'll happen. It always does." Nny's apathy made the fairy in the alley disgusted, so much so that she stepped forward reveling her horrid form. She wore a visible corset done so tightly that she looked like a small-chested diva attached to a spine that led down into a huge, ruffled Victorian dress colored as blood and dried blood that hid more legs than a woman should have that ticked against the hard ground as she hovered forward. Her hair blacker than even the dark sky with streaks of purple that limply fell over her eyes.

"...why a corset?" Nny asked the elegant ghostly woman.

"You tell me" she said, puffing out smoke. "I'm a part of your imagination, after all. You just have sick taste in clothing is all."

"What about this?" Nny asked, pointing to his own apparel.

"Ugh" she grunted in disgust. "I hat those shoes."

"Bitch" Nny shot back "I love these boots!" A moment of angry silence passed as the woman paced away and Johnny followed her, sipping madly from his drink.

"Your quota has fallen behind, no?" she asked, referencing his killing. Nny didn't respond, or even acknowledge the question, as he refused to acknowledge the consideration of his manifested conscious trying to pull him back into the horrible position he no longer occupied. "What about your art?" she asked much more seductively.

"It's going good" Nny responded, pulling ahead of her and briskly breaking ahead through the dank alley.

"But not great?" she responded.

"Great art happens out of nowhere" Nny educated. "I can try as hard as I want, but trying won't produce great art. I'll just...happen upon it when I'm supposed to." The strange woman took another drag from her unshrinking, inexhaustible cigarette and looked at Nny through her inverted eyes with white pupils against a cold black. She batted her blue lashes against her glowing white skin and formulated another question for her mental host.

"Your visions?" she pried. Nny stopped dead in his walk. All at once, his surroundings started fading into a blurred, watery mess, as if all the colors of the world were being flushed down a toilet.

"The visions?" he clarified. "Oh, they're just fan-fucking-tastic." The woman smiled an evil little smirk of a smile while Johnny glared white-eyed up at the heavens of red and black and laughed as loud and as deep as he could. In the background, the sounds of the police finally arriving and blindly shooting the two troubled young men echoed through the city, but Johnny's psychotic cackle echoed louder. Catastrophe rang out with his laughter, traveling from home to home and causing a widespread, unknown dread through all the pathetic citizens of this little spec of raped land.

When the one who lives and hunts alone comes upon the dense pack of those who always are together, the perversion of his ways alienating all those who would look upon him. He picks out his prey and waits with patience none could imitate. He waits until they are alone from their pack and family, then he pounces with a ferocity that sends the very Earth shaking and running with terror. Nny is that hunter, he who hunts for nothing and gains nothing by hunting. He who only has his mind to lose in a world that would reject it. He is the pillar upon which all madness stands, the core of all evil and hatred in the world.

He who sits at the throne, the true King of Killers, who's tongue is red from so many cherry drinks.


	14. tyme 4 pwnage, yo

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Over the last few days, the city had rebuilt and forgot about the most recent event in the public life of Satan himself. The circus was dismissed as an undercover terrorist plot which took thousands of lives. If nothing else, the chaos of the world would escalate due to the newest home-front attack. Samuel Corazo even affirmed the publics fear via a press conference.

"We at _Noche Internacional_ are regretful that we could not stop this attack" he was quoted as saying. "The repercussions have been felt by us all, and we will rebuild for you." His most famous hook, he addresses the public like a mess of frightened children and offers to do their work for them like a big brother. That's how he bought the city, for anyone who is curious about it. However, even a week after the preliminary game had ended, the contestants were still on terrible edge...

* * *

"Damn you, RoninMusashi12!" Pepito screamed through his headset. "Damn you, damn you and may you rot in HELL!" Pepito jumped and flailed as he shouted, keeping his controller in the careful and calm palm of his new brother who played alongside him in an unnamed but popular game. Pepito went stamping off to curse and rave in Spanish through the kitchen, then came back silently with two cold drinks in hand. "Grape or Orange?" he asked his brother.

"Uh, either one" Todd responded droningly. He was playing for two, after all. His attention could only be split so far. " I don't care." He handed his brother back his controller and he sat back down to try and turn the tables. It wasn't working. Pepito was continuously distracted by Todd's complete focus and how good he seemed to be at this hunt, stalk and murder style of game. In the straight-up deathmatches, he could only take the advantage of ambush and stalking so far before the mini-maps registered him. In this game style, called 'Wolves', he was dominating the scoreboard.

"You know" Pepito started, opening his Orange soda, "you play very much like a serial killer would." Todd chuckled softly and reached for his drink while in the down time between kills.

"Sure I do" Todd humored with laughter in his speech. He nearly gagged in surprise when the drink hit his tongue. "This is grape" he realized.

"Yeah" Pepito started, getting into his game, "I figured I'd mix it up. FUCK!" Not a second had passed then a stalker came out and killed him. "It's like they can walk through the fucking WALLS!" Pepito sensed a rage coming on, so he placed his controller down and stood up to stretch. While he was, he watched his brother play and marveled silently at his skills.

"As a wolf" Todd started dryly, "you can see better in the dark and you can squeeze through these little holes here" he exemplified by going up in the game and jumping through a hole in the wall. "We have a huge advantage here" Todd said, silently stalking up behind a running gunman and slitting his throat. Before the game could graphically catch up, he was off and running again, leaving the last second or so of his killing animation awkwardly playing in front of him as he ran through the tall grass and leaped up to tackle-stab another random man.

"Damn, _hermano_" Pepito praised, picking his own up again. "I mean...damn" Todd smiled at his brother's self-stylized praise and kept on playing the game. Then he ran into the guy who kept killing his brother, the 'RoninMusashi12, and followed him unseen.

"Behind you" Todd warned, watching as the player prepared to leap down from a ledge onto the armed avatar of Pepito. He spun around as quick as he could and finally avenged himself. Then, he proceeded to do a breathy cackle, patting his brother hard on the back with thanks.

"Good teamwork" Pepito said. Then a knife flew at him form a shadowed corner. "Fuck..." At least this time it wasn't the same guy.

* * *

After the game was forcibly ended by Satan, the boys had a nice Continental dinner and adjourned back upstairs to their rooms. The family room downstairs was for everyone at different times, and because of their father's "work", he got it when he was home in the evening to brush up on news and relax. The boys still had their own form of entertainment in their own respective rooms. While on the topic of rooms, Todd's was upgraded from guest to son with his own décor and whatnot. He and Pepito logged back in to a different game to join up with young Lena online.

"HI TODD :D" she texted. Over the past week, she had developed an awkward comfort with Todd over Pepito. His non-confrontational stability seemed to couple with her spontaneity and amorousness, at least to her. She always took advantage of his uninvolvement in her 'dealings' with the other students and made him a new victim. Right now, Todd was just as hated as Pepito and Lena by the students who cursed them from across the campus under their breath because he was both a brother and a significant other to the other members of Hell's own high school gang.

"Hi Lena" Todd typed back with a sigh. To him, she was just an annoying girl that like to hug him and strok his hair...and she was a vampire. He'd known stranger people in his life.

"Wurs bg gy'largh ne fu baab" Pepito typed...in some strange other language. A few moments later he typed again. "Sorry, wrong setting."

"Hi peppy" Lena greeted. In the game, Pepito gunbashed Lena in spite. Since the three were on the same team, it was just an angry little outburst. "Who're we killing today?'

"No" Pepito ordered, clicking through the lobby list of available games. "Squee is doing the work today." It was true, his in-game name was Squee.

"How so?" Todd asked. Soon, a game waiting prompt came up, then a map loading screen came up. Seconds later, thanks to the devil's awesome internet service, they were connected to a ranked, double experience game of 'Wolves'. Squee and Pepito started as wolves, sent out preemptively to the proverbial 'sheep' to find the best spots to hide.

"_Hermano!_" Pepito shouted, kicking open the door and charging his computer in with the wires trailing behind him. "Walk me through this."

"Eh? What about the messages?" Todd asked as Pepito plopped on the bed in his devily boxers and wifebeater.

"Neither of us can fight and type at the same time" he explained. "Just tell me where to go. You're the better killer here." Todd laughed the accusation off to his brothers chagrin. "I'm serious" Pepito said, raising his voice a bit. Todd stopped laughing and started off with his brother digitally in tow.

"Make sure you use the high grass a lot" Todd explained. "They won't see you if you hide good enough."

"Right" Pepito confirmed, taking a crouch down in a batch of grass between two buildings. Squee continued along down the road to the center of the map and spotted a manhole which he quickly slipped into. Down in the sewers, he saw that RoninMusashi12 was also playing as a wolf, undoubtedly form a console. The game's cross-platform compatibility is what made it such a curious hit with the gamers that played it. If you didn't own the console it was on, you could still play with people who _did_ own them with your computer. Obviously, the computer version was a little better.

"Oh, there's RoninMusashi12 again" Todd pointed out. Pepito looked over at his screen and saw the 'Game Start' warning come up. He turned back to his own screen and watched as the armed sheep came out of the dank little building, sprinting down the cobbled roads of the virtual old-world town, inaware of the traps set for them ahead.

* * *

Across town, far across town in the seedy little district where live our killers without their own houses, Tom was happily playing the same game he had been playing for the most godless amount of time in his tiny apartment, only now he had a guest joining him.

"I don't get it" Yvonne insisted.

"It's easy" Tom started, "but it's hard. You basically have to sneak around and out-maneuver-"

"How can a pissy little game" she huffed "make you such a good fighter!?" Tom just shrugged when his shoulder were free to do so. She scoffed and watched him play. At each opportunity to steal a life, someone else stole first. Someone by the game-name of 'Squee'.

"I played with this guy earlier" Tom said.

"Well, why don't you kill him?" Yvonne demanded. "He stole your target."

"Well, we're on the same team" Tom said with a sigh, "and he's better than me in this game mode." Yvonne blinked.

"You can admit that?" she said in anger. "How can you say that!?" Her anger didn't shake Tom, but it did make him curious as to where her anger came from. She wasn't playing the game, he was, and he could admit when someone was plainly better than him.

"I can admit when someone's plainly better than me" he explained. "I love these games, but just because you love something doesn't mean you can automatically be the best at it. Playing this game would be boring if I only ever won."

"Why!?" Yvonne shouted, still not grasping the concept of sportsmanship. "You should always strive to the best at everything, _ALWAYS!_" Now she picked him up by the shirt and pulled him up to her chest. "If you have such a relaxed attitude all the time you'll only ever fail! And what happens when you fail at life!?" Tom made an attempt to answer the obviously rhetorical question.

"You work at Sloppy Burger?" he answered.

"YOU DIE!" She screamed and slapped him across the face. "You have no place as the King of Killers. No place as anything!" When she was done throwing her insults she left and cursed outside. Her limo had been waiting all day for her to depart to her master suite hotel room. Tom just blinked and shook off the experience to return to his game. He became enthralled with watching this 'Squee' character so masterfully stalk and destroy his prey that he eventually abandoned his own killing and just tagged behind him.

"This guy rocks!" Tom exclaimed. "He probably knows every shortcut on this level." So the killer-in-training followed after the dementedly focused young potential killer in the game world that mimicked real tactics so much that the lines blurred for anyone who decided the game was fun enough to play all day. Squee became the inspiration of the brutal murderer who played behind the pixelated eyes of RoninMusashi12. Then, in his absent mindedness, a player named 'XxXSuckItGirlxXx' gave him a harsh shotgun slug to the head.

"Ah, shit" Tom swore as he waited to respawn.


	15. The Account of Little Miss Bitch

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

One night, very late at night, at a time when many normal people slept, a phone rang in one of the smallest apartments every built. Wherein this apartment sat Mort, meditating in place of solid sleep, with only a phone and his shovel in the corner. He broke his concentration and picked up the phone.

"..." He silently greeted into the phone. A silence came out from the other end for a while.

"...Hello?" the many voices of Remsius of Hell said curiously.

"Yes?" Mort replied.

"I'm sorry" the demon apologized preemptively, "I didn't memorize who got which phone. Is this 'The Mortician'?"

"Yes" Mort replied.

"Good" Remsius said. "You can pass this on to the young ones. We have your nest target ready. You may all move out whenever conveniences you, day or night."

"...Whom?" Mort asked. A brief rustling of paper was heard.

"Um...'Clarabelle Stevens'" Remsius read. "She's a children's show host for some god-awful Christian education show...ironic. Anyway, she sold her soul for a healthy, positive aura of friendliness to get her through life without anyone distrusting her, but she violated her contract."

"..." Mort replied.

"She has work during the day" Remsius explained, "so I humbly suggest an attack at night. Be careful, though. Her prestige and alliances with her workers and friends makes her difficult to approach with murderous intent in the day and she has...extraneous circumstances during the night."

"Right" Mort replied quickly.

"Make sure the young ones know about this" Remsius reminded. "I've already told Samuel, so you'd better get moving quickly!"

"Wait" Mort demanded. "Why should that concern me? Aren't we all-" the line went dead as he spoke. "-in this together?" he finished, trailing off and slowly placing the demonic telephone on its receiver. Mort picked his cloak up from under him and threw it on, grabbing his shovel as he departed form the hollowed-out utility closet he rented for free. He stomped up the stairs of the complex to Tom's door and rapped upon it loudly with his metallic instrument of death.

* * *

"Thomas!" Mort shouted, trying to get the young man's attention. He could hear the feint blaring sounds of video game noises from beyond the door. "Tom, open up!" The noises persisted relentlessly, as if Tom could not hear the giant pounding at his door. Mort assumed his own position of senior authority and tackled the door in. Tom was inside, playing his game with a pair of black goggles on that Mort had given him as an act of good will.

"WHAT!? Can't you knock!?" Tom shouted, seeing the man walk past the busted hinges of the door. Mort stared blankly, then shook his expression off and paced over.

"The next mark has been given" he shouted over the sound. Without hesitation, Tom extended his leg and turned his captivating machine off in the middle of his heated match.

"I have a phone, you know" Tom said snidely, raising himself up against his poster-cluttered wall. "Just call me next time."

"Fair enough" Mort began, crossing his arms. "Would you hear it?" Tom got the joke but didn't like it, sneering over his shoulder at the mocking man in his bedroom nook.

"Give me a sec to get ready" Tom said, proceeding to the back room. "Have a seat." Tom's apathetic wave to the bed gave Mort the permission to wipe away the magazines that covered it and he sat. The apartment was medium by normal standards but the clutter and junk made it seem almost claustrophobic. Upon that, the layout was annoying. The bed was right next to the front door, taking up the small corner of the hallway otherwise reserved for a potted plant or something.

The hall continued straight into a kitchen which seemed to be much cleaner than any other room. There were several smaller devices on the counters and old cartons of various take-out and delivery food stuffs. Before the opening to the kitchen, the hallway forked to the right and went into the formal bedroom, painted black and covered from floor to roof in promotional posters for various games. In that room hung two huge, flat screens on opposite walls that could be seen from either side of the bed. One was connected to a computer that had a myriad of sticky notes on its side and the other had two consoles at its base on the floor. Out in the hallway where the now ready Samurai-geared urban ninja now walked, there was a smaller TV hooked up to yet another console. Each of these electrical units was connected somehow to a tangled network of Ethernet cables that all extended from the plastered wall.

"Let's go" Tom said laxly, turning off the lights as he stepped out. Mort followed in his step and closed the door behind him.

"Shouldn't you lock it?" Mort suggested.

"Meh" Tom replied. "No one steals anything from there. Not since my security system got installed."

"What kind?" Mort asked, expecting a formal company to be named.

"Just an AK-47 hooked up to a thermal imaging system" Tom explained, bored with his words. "Nothing big." Mort looked at the boy curiously, not expecting something that actually sounded lethal to be that closely associated with him. Both boys walked out into the street, weapons in plain sight, and Mort tried to call down a cab. When he failed, he opted to just run out and catch one with his huge muscles. Upon his first try, the car screeched to a stop before it hit him and Tom jumped over the car to the driver side with his Uzi at the ready.

"This is our ride" Tom said menacingly, forcing open the door and throwing out the cabby before he could pull out his own gun. Mort bashed him with the handle of his shovel and climbed into the back while Tom sped off.

"Do you have a license?" Mort asked, not expecting a positive response. Tom didn't say anything, but he adjusted his mirror and kept a steady enough pace to lead Mort to believe that he really did have one.

"Nah" Tom replied. "I don't need one..." Mort put his hand to his face and watched out the window.

* * *

"DEVI!!" A woman roared from down the hall. Devi leaned back in her chair with a cigarette between her teeth and waited the angry woman's descent from her high perch down onto her with hefty critique. "What in the absolute Hell is THIS!?" a woman in a beige skirt and a plain purple sweater yelled, holding and pointing to a paperback script.

"It's you lines..." Devi said obviously. The woman grew even more scornful with tittering onlookers peeking over their cubicles at the scene about to erupt.

"You know why you're still here, Devi!?" The scornful Clarabelle Stevens shouted. Her face was a mixed plaster of black, short goth-style hair and a prettied up post-production face for the cameras of America's god-fearing children. "It's because you always screw up!" Her anger sailed straight through the care-free young writer, who just turned back properly into her seat and stretched her legs out.

"I'm not sure how I screwed up this time, Clara" Devi said. Clara proceeded to slam the script down on her desk, blowing away her papers, and flip through to the offending page. With a tense and shaking finger, she pressed down hard at the start of a sentence in the middle of page three. Devi leaned in and squinted to read the slightest clerical error that was punctuating a declarative sentence with an exclamation point.

"..." was Devi's response. Clara's teeth were still clenched in what Devi assumed was fear but saw as constipation. "That it?"

"THAT IT!?" Clara screamed, ripping up the script and dancing around in a boiling tantrum. Devi sat back and let it happen, holding back her flooding laughter for later when she decided not to smile. "The problem here is that I was directed to enunciate on a sentence that needed no enunciation by the director! Do you know how annoying the director is?"

"I can guess" Devi responded as neutrally as possible.

"That," Clara began with much disdain, "TOAD of a man demanded that I redo the line umpteen times! When he finally read this blasted script, he was fine with it, but because of _your_ mistake _I_ had to endure four more minutes of work than I was supposed to DO TODAY!!" The banging sound of her whiny voice was pushing Devi's head to the side. Clara started stomping away, but stopped short of the row of cubicle workers that would instinctively comfort her on sight like they always did. "If you were in my place for just one miserable day" she started again at Devi, "you would want to die."

"I barely talk to you" Devi fired back "and I already feel dead inside." Clara's sad face twisted with anger. She grabbed her head and reeled back, then angrily stomp-walked out of the studio. As soon as she heard the door slam, Devi and her close coworkers busted out in laughter. Surprisingly, quite a few goth girls worked at an all Christian children's channel.

"Did you hear her?" Devi said through her laughter. "She sounded like Hitler on PMS." The girls kept laughing out loud, much to the curiosity and chagrin of the other workers who supported the actress's rants and raves.

"Hey, you guys" on meek man spoke up to the cackling girls. "Maybe you shouldn't provoke her like that..." The girls quieted their laughter to a soft chuckling and prepared a response via selective goth telepathy.

"Well, it's kind of hard not to provoke a land mine when you stomp on it" Devi retorted. Her friends liked the joke.

"She has you job in her hands!" an older, more jaded employee shouted over the foam-like walls.

"Well," Devi started, "it's a good thing her anorexic arms can't squeeze a sponge let alone my rock-solid position." The girls continued to laugh, despite the uneasy mood that fell over the other workers.

* * *

Clarabelle stomped into her limousine, shaking it with her barely-proportionately weighted body. She was tall but skinny, on a dangerous razor edge of health, and to add to it she smoked when in private.

"Where to, ma'am?" the driver said from the front. Clara paused from lighting her cigarette as the car started moving to glare into the rear view mirror.

"Ma'am?" she reiterated, infuriated. "You did not just call me ma'am. You son of a-" she decided to scorn her driver up close and ducked over to the windowless cab at the front of the car. "-WHO do you THINK you A-a-ah..." She stuttered off fearfully because the driver of her car was not a normal man. It was one with metal piercings so painful looking and horribly placed that it questioned whether the man was still alive or not. His one eye was wide open and crazy looking. As he pulled to the curb, he turned his head slowly revealing the red, skinless muscle on the other side of his face that was pulled and twisted hideously by even more metal spikes that dug down into his skull.

"Around the fairway and back?" he asked demoniacally. "Right-o then, off we go..." The sharp of hearing could pick up the horrified scream of the lady as she was driven through the darkest of alleys back t o her apartment by the demon cabby, signaling to her that her time was nigh.


	16. The World is Useless without Beauty

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

In the heart of downtown the air was thick with the snobby smugness that was present with all the super-zealous of self-righteous. All the movers and shakers of 'nothing important' gathered at the various over-priced eateries that speckled the smoky streets. Everyone smoked, even people who didn't smoke or couldn't smoke smoked, because everything had to be just as cool as it looked. Unfortunately, this is where Clarabelle lived. The social poison had long ago seeped into her thin veins, making her a cynical bitch just like any given man or woman in this place.

Here, as effortlessly as before, Samuel was able to coast his way through the crowds with no cover but a cigarette in his mouth and a hand in his pocket. People could tell he was a busy worker, for whom they couldn't place, and time meant money. No one would stop him or try to question his motive because they all knew the only way into heaven was through a paper trail. Regardless, Sam went forth.

_This shouldn't be hard_ he thought, cradling his hidden gun with his fingers. _So then, I should assume this will suck._ He continued across the barren streets where everyone refused to drive and through the massive polluted square where many vagrants with cool hair slept on the ground. Even the lowest rung of humanity looked like a bunch of pricks and pretentious idiots. Still, with his camouflage, he glided straight into the hotel where the actress scheduled for death was reported to live...via his own sources.

"Here goes" he said to himself. He walked over the threshold to the hotel and up to the desk. Outside, the asinine residents of the adjacent park observed as, for the first time that month, a car rolled down the nearly abandoned streets. Inside Tom drove with Mort in the back, both taking in the scenery of apocalyptic-zombie-town gray and pompous-Gothic-black that was painted on every street and living thing. A general air of distrust and disgust was aimed at the yellow cab that clashed with the rest of the block so much that the paint even began to fade as it went along.

"Heads up" Tom warned, looking around nervously. "I think we're in for more fighting than Hell let on." Mort watched as people were discarding their sticks from their mouths and onto the ground. Many of them started marching forward after the boys in the cab.

"Maybe" Mort said, observing the skinny frames and silky-thin fabrics worn by the delinquent inhabitants of the area. "Even if they were zombies, they wouldn't be much of a fight..."

"True" Tom replied. He screeched the brakes as soon as he was in front of the right hotel. A quick, mobile cross reference on the woman in question revealed a recently released tabloid article about her current residence in the city. All signs and references pointed her to live here, a seventy-something story battlefield. "This is my map!" Tom exclaimed happily. They both exited the car to a field of unhappy, liquid-paper white faces.

"Hey man" one man that looked like a woman started furiously, "get that fucking thing outta here!" Mort and Tom glanced at each other, then feeling comedic, Mort pointed to himself in outrage.

"That fucking car!" a woman shrieked. "Get it outta here!"

"Cars are tools by the government" one man started from the crowd "that force us into dependency on foreign oil."

"They're all just big ,expensive excuses for the cock-headed politicians to kill innocent people for oil!" someone else protested.

"Cars are evil thing" a fat, gruffly voiced woman said. Mort looked around in disgust at all the abhorent images of human stupidity that were before him.

"No" Tom started patronizingly, "cars are instruments that _we_, the consumers, use with our own money at our own discretion."

"But instead of a car" someone started very defensively, "why not buy a horse?" The crowd agreed with him in total bias.

"Because horses aren't so strong" Tom said definitely "that they can last walking on solid concrete for their lives. Their hooves would fracture and their legs would break."

"Then tear down the roads" someone started righteously "and fill the streets with dirt! Horses can walk on dirt."

"You're misinterpreting the point" Mort started irkedly "that he's trying to make."

"Oh yeah?" some guy shouted defensively. The crowd grumbled their support for the nameless person and all lit up their cigarettes. Apparently, that was all they could say. The crowd departed, someone taking the car with them, as the two men entered the hotel unaware how far behind Samuel they were.

* * *

"YOU WORTHLESS SACKS OF UTTER SHIT!" Clara screamed from her spacious room. She threw everything she could at the cockney demon that followed her to her room, informing her of her most untimely fate, but nothing impacted. Everything bounced off of an invisible barrier of liquid-like appearance just in front of him.

"Calm down, love" the demon retorted.

"I will NOT!" she hotly screamed back. She advanced quickly up to the demon as close as she could get to register the extent of her distress. "Just look at me!" she demanded, referencing the feint wrinkles on her cheek. "I'll only be beautiful for a little while longer, and people are coming to see me!"

"Kill you, love" the demon corrected.

"I know that!" she hotly replied "but not while I'm ugly!" She paused, began pacing while rubbing herself in a fit of frenzied panic, then reached a realization. "I can just stall them!"

"All night?" the demon asked.

"Yes" she crazily replied. "During the day I'm a beautiful actress who spreads joy and peace to millions! But at night, I'm a monster. All a part of this horrid curse that came with my bestowal of power from the devil!"

"But at night" the demon started curiously, "aren't you also a very powerful monster?"

"I'm still a monster!" she shouted in distress. "I can already feel my skin starting to sag and drip off, the horrible appendages starting to burrow forth. My legs will be torn apart and my nails will become long and yellow! None of that..." she now started very quietly, "IS PRETTY!" she screamed, throwing her entire vanity stand with one arm into the demon cabby. He flew with it across the room and slammed into the wall. Clarabelle stood panting, her face beginning to thin and her eyes beginning to shine violently yellow. "I can't have people seeing me like that" she said. "I'm going to hide..." so she looked around for an appropriate place to hide, spotting the air duct that fed her expensive air conditioning. It was narrow enough that she could fit and inconspicuous enough for her to effortlessly stay in for her immortal night.

So she climbed in, first removing the grate and stopping the fan, and took away into the steely arteries of the cool building. She was unaware that her room would soon be violated by the riotous likes of the killers on their way.

* * *

Down the humbly smog-filled street galloped a parade of white horses. Under the environmental conditions they, like the cab, started to turn a dusty gray from the air. In the center of the cavalcade of steeds was a lone carriage of obnoxious pink that acted like a peeking sun over the hills to the city block filled with vampires. Inside this exuberant bubbles sat the patient Yvonne, looking through her collection of stained and stainless-steel bats trying to decide which she would carry into battle.

The choices were hard to make, but she eventually decided on a classic: hardwood pine made from the rare Whitewood tree of her home town. Cut down in the dead of winter just last year, the bat's power was not inhibited by its virtually weightless frame. Truly, would a killer carry such an object to war, this would be it.

"Yes" she pinned, "this will do. After all, it's just some prissy actress, not a hardened killer or psycho freak with access to weapons...DRIVER!!" she suddenly shrieked. The carriage driver attempted to ignore the spit being fired at him by the pedestrians and the curses they threw long enough to lean back and listen. "Are we there yet?" Yvonne asked impatiently.

"Not quite, miss" the driver answered. He swerved to dodge a bottle, then noticed the monolithic hotel in front. He pulled out a small communicator and instructed the head of the caravan to turn in some odd Eastern European dialect. The horses pulled in front of the building and stopped when the carriage was in alignment to the front door. Several servants rushed out and prepared a red carpet upon the ground for their princess to step upon.

"We are ready to receive you, your highness" one of her servants said, knocking on the carriage door. The door opened and out stepped Yvonne, wearing her usually hot-pink leather corset with white lace sleeves and a miniskirt. Her stiletto boots of whit and lime-green stretched up past her knee with a myriad of belts and buckles, adding nearly half a foot to her height. She had her honey-blonde hair up in a messy, curly bun that drooped down from the top of her head to the back of her neck. Moreover, she wore little makeup, just some lipstick and blush as opposed to any other given day.

"Thank you, good sir" she said to her servant. Some angry spectator spat just in front of her from behind the line of men standing guard.

"Hey, bitch!" that spitting man shouted with a speck of drool at his mouth, "You know horses can't walk on pavement! It hurts their feet and legs!" The crowd grumbled in agreement with him. Yvonne chuckled, stepped off of her carpet and approached the man with her tittering smile. Without a word of warning she reached behind her and found her bat, swinging it into his face. The man's jaw was knocked almost clear out of his mouth and his teeth went flying along with a stream of gooey blood. The crowd looked on as the man was dropped to the ground, his assailant fearlessly stowing her bat back in a holster behind her and walking up the steps. Before she went inside, she signaled one of her men who promptly rushed to her.

"No one saw this" she commanded secretively. The man nodded and the princess left. Her servant made another nod at the others, and pulled out a silenced gun. Everyone was armed, the driver with a larger automatic, all with silencers.

"So decreed the princess" he dramatically repeated, "'No one saw this'". And then came the favorite part of their jobs. The district that is home to the most pompous of individuals had its population severed to pieces that day, as the killers marched to the front desk one after another for the same exact information:

"In what room stays Ms. Clarabelle Stevens?" Yvonne asked courteously. The receptionist sighed and replied to her.

"Suite 56, 67th floor." With the knowledge in her head, Yvonne politely nodded and skipped along to the elevator.


	17. Arachnophobia Rising

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

The sky began to darken, casting an obelisk shadow across the grounds of the hazy streets of downtown. Within the tower of madness (as it were) our anti-heroes began their nefarious patrol to find their target, a woman seen just that morning on cable television as a cheery young voice of gleeful prophecy. The narrator and contemporary actress on an educational super-Christian television show. The twisted minds responsible for her success now require a body, and the killers sought that body. Unknown to them, said body still lived and hid itself well within the ducts of the buildings air system, becoming more mysteriously cursed as time progressed. With no alliance but jovial reason to tether the combatants together, each evil person stalked with only their own best intentions at heart.

* * *

At the top of the ladder walked Sam, ready to draw upon sight of anything inhuman with his gun. He checked each room carefully when there was no one in it. Each lock was easily picked by a mysterious tool hidden in his sleeve. So far, of the rooms that were empty or those that had sleeping tenants, he found nothing. No signs of super-natural activity beyond a few modern-art pieces that precariously hung above beds.

"Damnation" Sam cursed softly in the hall. "She must be hiding, but where?" Sam stopped and listened carefully. The walls had been banging near a certain room for quite a while. "..." Since the noise wouldn't stop to his apparent telepathic broadcasts he decided to go to the room. Ignoring the 'Do Not Disturb' sign on the handle, he jimmied the lock and crept in. He heard now an erotic moaning coming from a room still withing the apartment. He withdrew his gun, expecting to see some demonic display of netherworldy oddity, but snuck into a dark room of a couple engaged in...more human activities. Regardless, now was a good time to extract information.

"Freeze!" Sam shouted, aiming his gun at the man's head. The woman below him shrieked and jerked away, leaving the man crouched precariously on his knees with his hands up. "Cover yourself and stand up." Sam demanded.

"Give me a sec, cuz" the man asked feebly. "My wang really hurts..." Sam growled, noticing the woman cowering in the corner with a large, night-shirt on already. The man tied his bedsheets around his waist and turned around. He wasn't ugly, but he wasn't very easy to see with a woman either. He had more hair in his sideburns that on his head.

"In the corner" Sam demanded, waving his gun. The man carefully stepped over and hid in the corner with the woman.

"I swear" the man started with a quiver, "she's over 18!"

"What do you know about Clarabelle Stevens?" Sam asked. The couple looked at him curiously, and the girl formulated an answer.

"The actress?" she responded. Sam nodded, keeping his gun mechanically straight. "She lives down the hall...right?"

"And she's a bitch" the man added. "If you're gonna kill her, make it quick, okay?"

"...fair enough..." Sam responded. "Sorry to bother you." Sam tipped an imaginary hat with his gun and began out of the apartment when the man rushed over and grabbed his shoulder.

"Dude, what the FUCK!?" he crudely shouted. Sam turned slightly and stowed his gun. "One minute I'm doin' my bitch and then you hold a gun to my face!? Now, it's all good with you? Well it ain't all good with me. You better represent and compensate for this intrusion else I'mma bust you up in-" Sam raised up his empty hand and placed it flat against the man's chest.

"...fair enough..." he coldly reiterated. With only a push the man was thrown through the plaster of two walls and his head crashed violently against the wall of his shower. As his blood lubricated the back of his skull, his body slid down and turned on the faucet, sending cold water onto his body. The girl likewise screamed and ran out of the building, half-naked, while Sam continued on his way down the hall. Then, in the hallway, he stopped.

"Fuck" he cursed. "Now I need the room number..." and so he listened for signs of life on the floor between the doors and prepared another interrogation.

* * *

"So" Tom started as he casually stalked the halls ahead of Mort, "are we...cool?"

"That term means 'forgiven'" Mort explained hesitantly. "That is, unless black people have changed the lingo again."

"I didn't mean to be racist" Tom nervously explained.

"You're not" Mort clarified. "I don't believe in racism. I'm a human, you're a human, that's all that matter. Although, you are much shorter than me...shorty. Heh." Tom could tell his large friend was joking.

"Us." Tom began again. "As allies, or whatever. Friends."

"Of course" Mort affirmed. "You and I have a common goal in mind."

"That's why I ask" Tom said. "Eventually, they'll start killing us off. Either the targets will get harder to kill or we'll be forced to compete for our lives. If it comes down to the two of us, one of us will die."

"The winds don't speak of such things" Mort said prophetically. "We can cross that bridge when we come to it, my young friend. Until then, we must enjoy this walk in these dark woods and beware of the lightning Heaven casts upon us." Tom blinked a few times, then shook off his confusion and understood the message. With a nod he confirmed with his parnter and they busted in a door together.

"WE WANT INFO!" Tom shouted demandingly.

"Whither lives Clarabelle Stevens!?" Mort screamed.

* * *

Through the telltale air ducts Clara heard the maniacs searching for her. Once she spotted them through the deactivated fans, a massive black man in black and purple and a noisy young man with many weapons.

"They're crazy!" she noted. Continuing through the vents, she saw the door to her room opened and assumed the worst. "They know I'm here! But they don't know just where I-" she stopped upon seeing a figure exiting her room. It was a young maid pushing a metal cart of dishes and towels, looking back occasionally and glaring at the room curiously. "Good, just a maid..." Clarabelle continued to crawl away, trying to find a duct that led downward but coming up short. The the cool breeze of central air conditioning blew at her from the left. She followed it to a downward shaft and slipped carefully through it, the rest of her tattered body trailing behind. As the sun sank, her body began to change according to the curse part of her career-creating deal with the devil. A loud clacking of something hard upon metal came from wherever the metal duct was exposed, raising a curious glance from everyone who heard.

"Stupid legs!" she shushed. "Be quiet!" Then, the air stopped. All the air conditioning and lights for the building went out. Clarabelle took the advantage of darkness and slipped out of a grate and onto the plush carpeting of the current floor. Through the dark she could see the room number and knew where she was. "Shit. I only got two floors away from them. Oh well, they still can't find me."

"Hey HEY!" a fat, loud man shouted form his door. "What the fuck is fucking happening!?"

"I don't know!" a random voice shouted across the dark. Clara continued awkwardly along on her long and growing new limbs without anyone being any wiser.

"Get it working!" the fat man roared. "It's hot as a motherfuck in here without my air conditioning!"

"Yeah?" another voice joined, this time a cantankerous lady. "Well it's hot in here too!"

"Shut it, bitch!" the fat man yelled.

"Eat shit, asshole!" the other voice ordered.

"Looky, daddy!" a young girl screamed from her doorway. "I can see on in the dark!" The little girl switched on a pair of night vision goggles, catching a glimpse of Clarabelle as she stalked down the hall. Her legs were gone, replaced by eight sticks that grew out from her hips and divided near where her knees may be. The ends were bony, yellow growths. It looked like a hideous dress, but it was in fact a single part of her monstrous form. From the waist up she looked normal, except her mouth. Her face seemed fine, but when she breathed out, it opened from the cheekbone down to the mouth with jagged, razor sharp teeth. The little girl became paralyzed in fear until her father pulled her back in and scolded her for misusing his equipment.

_Foolish little maggots_ Clarabelle harshly thought in reference to the various cretins in the hallway. _Such idiots, so noisy and angry...I can't stand it! All these morons going about their useless, ugly lives, living out on their wildest ugly impulses! Having children in the impossible hope that they will grow up beautiful to support their parent's drug and alcohol problems...I hate this place. I hate these people!!_

"Goddammit" she hissed in a loud and menacing growl. "I HATE YOU ALL!!" The lights came back on in a flicker from the surge, and everyone saw Clarabelle part her hideous legs and charge at everyone who's head was barely peeking out of the frame.

"I hate you too!" the greasy fat man shouted before Clara bit off his head with her expanded, bony jaw. She pierced another person with her spiked leg and spat poison in the faces of anyone else she saw. It was a heinous massacre that an unfortunate maid was able to see on her way down the staircase before the window of the stairwell got splattered with blood. The girl cried shrilly as she ran down the steps, tearing off her clothes as quick as she could and loading a shotgun.

"I'm going to win!" Yvonne, no longer in disguise as a maid, shouted with glee. "I'm definitely going to win!!" She continued to load the shotgun and proceeded back up the stairs. She busted down the door to the bloody floor but only saw a glimpse of the hideous arachnoid woman as she slipped away down a fresh hole in the wall. Yvonne readied her gun and licked her supple lips before charging ahead to chase down her prey. The barely living still on the floor groaned and gurgled til they died, horrible evidence of the rampage that a hellion on contract had caused.

Clarabelle continued to descend through the wall, heading for the basement, where she would attempt to defy fate in the dark basement.

_I can't die _Clara thought to herself, chocking down some ugly victim's guts. _There's no way I'll die! No! I'M TOO BEAUTIFUL TO DIE!!_ She continued to skitter down vertically as her posterior grew into an arachnoid abdomen with an imprint of her face on the back. The moon was now high in the sky, casting an ominous shadow across the downtown where this demon now prepared to ravage across.


	18. In the Spider's Web

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Sam dashed down the hallway, unknown that Tom and Mort closed in from the adjacent stretch. They all were heading for the same elevator, but Sam was able to break much faster.

"Hey!" Tom shouted in vain "you better not close, stupid elevator!"

"Are you sure I'll fit in there?" Mort asked, stealthily making fun of Tom's height again. Then the blurred shadow of Sam darted from the blind corner and darted straight into the elevator. Tom and Mort screeched their heels to a stop, seeing that their opposition had beaten them fair. Sam brought his extended legs together and stood up straight, breathing a bit, and adjusted his glasses slightly.

"Did you hear it too?" Sam asked. Tom and Mort both nodded.

"Something lurks" Mort began "within these tower walls. We intend to find and fight it!"

"And which way shall you go?" Sam asked. "In a tower, there are only so many directions one can move. The most used ones being either up or down."

"We're going up" Tom decided. "Where else would a monster retreat but to high grounds?" Sam didn't move, and if he blinked they couldn't tell.

"I suppose" Mort added, hearing the elevator ding and seeing the doors slowly close "we shall take the stairs."

"Hmm" Sam grunted in his parting glance. The doors closed and Tom was already busting through the stairwell entrance. Mort followed after him, watching the floor number of the elevator's display steadily decrease.

"It seems that he's descended!" Mort shouted into the echoing walls. Tom grunted and ket running up the stairs.

"He's not always right!" Tom shouted back. "Besides, it's a natural kind for instinct for creatures with their lives threatened to run uphill! That way they can protect themselves better."

"Sounds fine enough" Mort shouted, following closely behind.

* * *

Down below the furthest reach of the hotel's floors, Clara had finished her hideous transformation as Yvonne stalked her way into the newly-furnished lair. The air smelled sickening, like burning afterbirth and silk. All throughout the basement, filled with pipes and creaking machines, was the sound of some sick moaning. Perhaps one of the scents in the air was vomit from the detestable creature that the killer stalked. Yvonne prepared herself for the worst, keeping low and her hand on her solid bat, ready to swing at whatever decided to jump out first.

_Wherever you are_ Yvonne,owed to herself, _I will find you, little bug..._ Around the corner, the flickering light and loudening moaning gave the form of an approaching figure. Yvonne ducked into a pipe-lined corner and waited, the figure shuffling closer with each loud moan. Rounding the corner was an old man, part of his face was gone and riddled with spider webs, part of his face that would otherwise open into his mouth. Before she could see him, Yvonne took a step in and swung her bat to his head with the full kinetic force of her hips. The man's head opened up and blood was splattered onto the wall in a horrible splattered gush. Yvonne caught herself to late, as the old gentleman's face-hole and the crack where his brains leaked out were now blended together.

"Whoopsies" Yvonne cutely brushed off. "I just have to watch where I'm swinging next time. Stoopid me!" She pawed innocently at her head, barely catching a glimpse of some shadow creeping along behind her. She quickly whipped out her shotgun and spun around, aiming down the barrel with her bat in her mouth. There was nothing, just a damp concrete wall. Again, however, she heard a certain moaning. It was a bit louder from that direction, and sounded sad. Yvonne stowed her gun and her bat, casually walking down the twisting corners and halls until she could clearly hear the sobbing that echoed through the basement. It came from a stairwell.

"The subbasement?" Yvonne noted. "I'd have to be really stupid to just walk down there. It's obviously a trap..." So, cupping her chin, Yvonne thought. However, after such privileges that she had been granted like having others think for her, she was much better off banging her head against a metal pipe to form a plan than to think for herself. "This isn't working" Yvonne told herself, pressing her finger hard to her forehead and making circles with her tense skin. "I should just go check it out and run if I see that I can't handle it..." With her mind made up, she decided against her rational thoughts and began downstairs. The lights were off down there and the walls, which she felt at to get around, were covered almost everywhere in dry cobwebs.

"This is disgusting" Yvonne complained, shaking the webbing off her hand. Then, her legs caught the sticky webs, forcing her to jump. "Where is this bitch?" Yvonne continued downward, trying to find some way to see. Her bat clicked against something metal, and she reached up above her head, finding a loose chain. She yanked it and it snapped off, turning on a light bulb. The surroundings became visible, everything covered in horrible webbing. Human corpses, some already damp skeletons, hung on the walls in heavy cocoons of web. Intricate patterns that would take armies of spiders to otherwise make were constructed as walls that blocked off doors and other passages. From one of the webbed-off areas came the low crying, as well as a shortly lived tearing sound. Yvonne considered that her target was in that direction and hurried to find a way around, the webs impeding her only for the moment it took her to shake them off

Meanwhile, despite the signs, Sam smoked on his way down in the elevator. His destination was the lobby.

"Not too long ago" he said to himself, "there was a loud screaming a few floors below me. That means that she's still heading down. There's a good chance that I'll encounter her if I just stay and wait for her, but if she knows we're here like I theorize then she'll already be trying to avoid us. If she isn't in the lobby, I'll have to wait below still..." He removed his cigarette, having spent it, and stomped it out on the carpeted elevator floor. "Tom's theory is right about animals, but Demons always try to get as close to home as they can. The fires of hell are their blankets of illusion..."

* * *

Meanwhile, up on the roof, Tom and Mort searched around the roof, many times, and found nothing.

"This sucks!" Tom yelled into the rising night. "No one's up here but them!" And Tom pointed, teeth clenched angrily, at two very ugly young men making out on the roof's ledge, completely ignoring the others. Mort finally gave in to the temptation and pushed them both off with his mighty hand, chuckling as he listened to them plummet to the ground.

"Gays are funny when they fall" Mort said mindlessly. Tom jumped up and slapped Mort's head, knocking him back to reality. "Perhaps she retreated to a more sheltered place" Mort offered. "It's not like there aren't safe houses of some kind in this neighborhood.

"I doubt it" Tom said. He looked down over the ledge, pulled out a pair of binoculars, and observed. "This place is surrounded by demons" Tom explained. Mort took away the binoculars and peered through one end with his mighty eye, spying many men in Mafia-esque suits standing in a perfect line. All of them had firy horns and all of them had holes for faces.

"Curious, isn't it?" Mort pointed out, handing Tom his binoculars back. "We were tasked with killing this woman, chosen by the bony hand of malicious destiny, and yet the devil's army stands ready to storm the fortress of this renegade and kill viciously. It's as if we have been built up without the hope of our benefactor."

"He doesn't think we can do it" Tom simplified. "That scoundrelous bastard of a hellion ass-wipe!"

"Whom" Mort asked. "Satan? You thought he was good?"

"Didn't you?" Tom asked. Suddenly, of all the lights that were on in the uppity city, only the stars were still shining. Every building lost its power. The air conditioning unit on the roof even stopped humming and quickly squeaked to a stop.

"That's no good" Tom said.

"Indeed" Mort added. "I suppose this has something to do with the demon..."

"Let's find out" Tom said, motioning towards the elevator.

* * *

"Huhuhu" Clara sobbed. She hunched over herself in a corner of her devious maze, ripping apart a random body with her horrid claws that extended form her fingers and gnawing with her mangled maw. Yvonne peeked around the corner and saw the huge body weeping over itself, eight hideous stilted legs all crouched down with her huge abdomen on the ground. "Why must this always happen?" she lamented, picking apart the body absent-minded, and pitching the chunks aside.

_Is this her?_ Yvonne asked herself. She continued to listen as she stealthily removed more webs from her hair and the rest of her being. _She's pretty..._ It was true. With her massive, alien jaw shut she looked just a beautiful as normal. But when she went to bite, as she did with the mid-scream frozen head she devoured, her face split apart between her eyes and all the way back to her ears. Even then, Yvonne was impressed with her to a point.

"No one" Clara lamented as she chewed "ever played with me as a kid. No one even approached me...I was never ugly or unlikable. Everyone always said I was cute. The children, even up until high school, always said I had a 'personality problem'..." she sniffled, took a gruesome handful of some mysterious organs, and gnawed on the ferociously before continuing. "I never knew what they meant, and just as I was about to die, _he_ came to me. 'Are you lonely' he said? 'Fuck yes' I sobbed. And then, he gave me the offer, to make me pretty and popular and loved throughout my whole life...Huhuhu"

"Too bad" Yvonne said, edging around the corner. Clara darted, glaring at her through the shadows with eight irises. "Your life is now over, isn't it?" Yvonne tapped her solid bat against the ground twice, then snatched it up and started walking forward, her tongue flicking from side-to-side around her lips murderously. Clara stood up on all eight of her skittering legs and raised up high, pressing against the low roof of the dungeonous subbasement and glaring with glowing eyes at the girl.

"Foolish girl" Clara growled demoniacally, expanding her mouth to its monstrous form. "I'll eat your pretty little head!"

"Oh?" Yvonne cutely grunted, twirling her hair, "you think my head is pretty?" And so, their battle began.


	19. To Kill an Insect

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

The monster Clara loomed her dripping, evil maw over Yvonne, who just stood still and silent, watching and waiting. Her hand was lax and limp but her arm was tense and ready. Yvonne stared straight up through her lashes, and saw her opportunity. Clara's monster mouth was partially closed, as if she was about to strike, so Yvonne rolled out just as the acidic teeth crunched down to where her head was. Then, while still in the motion, she drew out her bat and took a step forward. Clara raised her head only to get a vicious blow to her bony cheek.

"GAAHH!!" she screamed. "You bitch!"

"Come on!" Yvonne taunted, swinging her hips playfully. "You're the monster here! Shouldn't you be winning?" Clara growled at her, clutching her surly broken jaw, then roared and charged forward with her clawed hand swinging.

"I''l rip you apart!" she threatened. Yvonne hopped daintily aside from the swiping claw, ignoring her strength and murderous intent.

"Go on then" Yvonne continued to taunt. Clara growled viciously, her swings became faster and harder. She struck a wall and reduced it to chunks and bits of plaster that exploded out from the spider-web casing. Yvonne jumped aside form the blow and landed daintily on her feet. "You're quite strong for an old lady." That one got to Clara bad. She reeled up, screeching inhumanly, and started stabbing at Yvonne with four of her eight ground-piercing legs. Yvonne sensed the coming danger and took chance by the hair. She exchanged her bat for her loaded gun and blasted Clara on the underside of her exposed abdomen.

"AAAAHHHHH!" Clara roared. She didn't expect her to react so quickly, nor did she expect a shotgun to her stomach region. The blast created a prominent gouge in her underbelly that quickly scabbed and bled over itself. "I'll kill you, you bitch!"

"I'm right here!" Yvonne shouted back. "Come and get me!" So Clara did, reacting in a very human way, and delivered a sturdy punch to Yvonne's side. The girl flew into the soft wall of webs and thudded to the ground. "What kind of lady throws a punch?" Yvonne groaned. She looked up, and there was the monster again, ready with a roaring mouth and a looming, jagged leg. Yvonne rolled out of the way, her hair tie getting caught as well as a few strands of hair.

"You rotten little beast" Clara growled. Yvonne rounded a corner and waited for the monster to come around. "...hu..." Clara sadly began sobbing. "Huhuhu. You have no idea what kind of life I'm forced to live!"

"A life of fame" Yvonne said. "IN exchange for fame, you get power? That seems like a deal that was cheated in your favor."

"I'm not powerful!" Clara argued. "I'm ugly! I'm a hideous mess of a monster...a deformed accident of even Hell's wrongdoing by night and then a tortured star by day! No one really appreciates me...they only appreciate how I look...All I have is my face..." and now she came around the corner sobbing, her maw opened and her eyes streaming with tears. "And now look at it! Huhuhuhaw...."

"It's not that bad..." Yvonne said, preparing her gun to blast her head apart behind her back. "Just close you mouth for a second..." Clara, believing the girl's sincerity, clamped her mouth shut. Her face looked perfectly normal again, even pretty to Yvonne. "See? You're really beautiful even as a monster..."

"Really?" Clara muttered with her mouth still shut. She skittered away to a mirror, a huge one stoled from what had to be a 'Big and Tall' store, and looked in it. She forced her warped face muscles to smile as she used her nerve-less claws to feel about her nice face, then Yvonne cracked her in the head with her bat. Clara struggled to recover, then roared and look up. Yvonne was on her back, shotgun pointed between her jagged teeth, ready to fire.

"Although" Yvonne started nefariously, "this look suits you more right now!"

* * *

"This doesn't look good" Mort said. The entire floor was covered in blood stains from the recently deceased. A hole was in the far wall. Guts and scattered body parts were littered about sloppily, as if some hungry monster wanted to eat in a hurry and never got to finish its meal.

"I guess" Tom said "it went through here already..."

"Good guess" Mort replied. "Looks like Samuel was correct. The monster took reuge in the basement."

"Indeed" A cockney, unfamiliar voice said. From one of the open doors where some tenants were killed stood the distorted demon that drove miss Clarabelle to her doom. "She's a tricky one, she is."

"Who are you?" Tom demanded.

"You don't need to know" the demon replied. "What you _do_ need to know is this: Satan has sent you all new instructions." Mort and Tom blinked, not expecting a demon to come to their aid like this, especially after the last time where no one helped them at all or gave them boundaries. "You have until morning. If she ain't dead by then you all fail." Both killers were shocked.

"Just a hypothetical" Mort began. "If we fail...?"

"You die" the demon replied. "And you won't go to hell, either. You won't go anywhere. It's the worst kind of death possible: 'Stasis Shock'."

"What's that?" Tom asked, oblivious to what was evidently a big deal.

"You'll be immortal" the demon explained "and unable to move. Every injury you sustain will be healed, every sickness uncured but not lethal, all pain stored and sustained within you. You will act as a lock through which all pain and torment in this world is filtered, a living bank of suffering. And there will be no escape or help. Your bodies will be hung from the highest peaks of the world and demons from a realm of undefinable death and doom will come out to ransack and rape you all for all eternity. Only the total obliteration of the universe will be your release from death, and by then you'll have enough pain to end the world yourselves...basically."

Both men were wide-eyes with terror over the glorious gory details of their hypothetical torture. "That does sound sucky" Tom noted.

"Quite" the demon said. "I suggest you all try and hurry. It's barely midnight as it is, and at this rate it won't end well for any of you..." and with a glowing smile, the demon dissipated into mist and vanished altogether.

Tom and Mort took a good long few seconds before deciding their next move together. Through mutual understanding of the direness of their situation, they both hurried toward the hole in the wall and took independent grips of metal pipes and chunks of miscellanious wall-innards.

"I think I'm repelling on asbestos" Tom mentioned as he climbed down after Mort.

"Doesn't matter!" Mort called. "Hurry down!!!"

Down in the lobby, Sam sat in the darkness of the tower with no electricity in a chair. Most of the people, the ones that screamed and managed to find their way through the dark, had fallen victim to some horrible thing that used the black as a cloak to stalk about. He could still hear their horrible legs clicking and clacking about on the tiled floor and the marble walls. He assumed they followed a similar theme to their creator, his target, but through his eyes his couldn't see anything. A few of them brushed past him, carrying dismembered parts of dead bodies with them.

_The basement_ Sam thought. _I need to get down there without moving... _Finally the sounds of rapid clacking stopped and a door shut. Sam decided now to take out a pocket flashlight and look around the ruined lobby. Not a soul was living but him.

"That'll be easier" Sam noted. He stood up and aimed around to the door, marked with nail-sized trails of blood. Sam adjusted his glasses with the tip of his gun and started forward.

* * *

"Let GO!" Clara shouted.

"Fuck you!" Yvonne roared back. With her shotgun disarmed, Yvonne had resorted to pulling on Clarabelle's silky hair until it ripped out. "Why should a monster like you have such pretty hair!?"

"Shut up!" Clara screamed. "I'm beautiful!" She whipped her upper, human body around and slammed Yvonne into a hard wall. Her grip didn't waver, but it did force her to blink. "I am BEAUTIFUL!" she roared again, slamming Yvonne into another wall. This one crumbled a bit, and Yvonne coughed up a bit of blood, but her grip was strong. "I'M GORGEOUS!!!" Then she whipped forward, and Yvonne flew off with hair in her hands. She stayed still on the cold ground, blood coming from her mouth, as Clara felt at her head intensely. She felt at the spots where her hair had been ripped out, she could feel it through her claws and how they scratched on her bare scalp.

"**RAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!"**

Clara's scream shook the entire building. Yvonne crawled back up, insane with thought of evil and murder. She took her bat out and clutched it.

"What are you!?" Clara roared, losing her humanity fast. "Some kind of freak? A Masochist!?" Yvonne stood silent, wavering against the pressure of her voice, then burst forward. Her swing was mighty and forced many of Clara's legs off the ground. She kept swinging, hearing the splintering cracks that came form the spider-woman's mouth. Clara put the tips of her claws together and formed one sharp point, with which she intended to skewer Yvonne. Before her terrible, thin arm could throw itself out quick enough, Yvonne kicked the claw away. Her strength was surprising. "Where is this all coming from!?"

"RAH!" Yvonne screamed, with only one hand she threw Clara's entire body backwards. She smashed into a wall, out of which scurried many dog-sized spiders. Yvonne writhed around limply, like she was half-dead, like a zombie, and raised her bat up. Clara hissed and clacked her teeth. The spiders listened and all rushed to the girl that was now sprinting forward. Yvonne was successfully intercepted by Clara's spiders, which she batted and stomped off hastily. For each spider that she killed, Clara hastily created more, moaning in pain as she squeezed out soggy egg after egg onto the ground.

"You'll never win, you heartless little twit!" Clara called out to the ceiling. Yvonne said nothing. "No matter what, I'll always be beautiful! Even as a monster I'm prettier than you! And when your eyes have been plucked out of their sockets I shall eat you as I have eaten everyone else! I can do as I wish! My whim becomes reality! I am the PARAGON of Beauty!"

"You know what I think is pretty?" said a voice from behind, followed by the click of a gun's hammer and the touch of burning-cold metal on her head. Clara's eyes lost all lucidity, all life, and her mouth slowly parted in all places with shock. "A nice big hole in your face..." Business-minded Sam shot his gun, which roared like lightning from the peaks of heaven and crackled down the air into the caverns of hell. Clara's face vanished, only part of her skull and a fragmented lower jaw remaining. The portrait marking of her human face was gone as well, a symbol of her life now gone forever. The spiders back down and curled up, though Yvonne still berserked her way through them, smashing them all repeatedly like a child in a tantrum.

"That's it" Sam said to himself, leaving the obviously crazed girl alone. "These demons are all quite weak..." He adjusted his tie and returned to the surface again...

"We're here!" Tom's voice called. He and Mort had finally come to the right place only to find the massive spider corpse and crazy, exhausted Yvonne expending the last of her conscious energy into liquefying another helpless creature.

"They're all in shock" Mort observed. "The mother must have died."

"Yvonne!" Tom urgently called. He rushed over to her side and took her in his arms, and she collapsed softly into them.

"Idiot" she whispered. "If I die, don't you dare touch me..." and then she slept. Tom picked her up, like a gentlemen, and carried her out. Of course, being the young man he was, he decided not to let all his efforts go to complete waste and propped her up by the butt and the breasts anyway.

"Even if I die" Tom said, relishing the feeling of her soft, squishy skin, "I'll be happy." Mort stayed behind him, studying the webs that quickly started to rot away with the spider-monster's headless body.

"This is not her work" he muttered. "I don't trust him as a man, nor as a killer..." and with that he stomped off, the last of the killers to leave the dead one well enough alone. His mind continued to wander and wonder about everything, even why he bothered to come at all, but his body marched on behind his friend.

In the dead of night, the killers emerged victorious into the empty, black streets, and all set off for their different abodes with not a word to each other...the next round would be harder, no doubt.


	20. His World, Her World

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

A new town, a new morning. Clouds moved rapidly through the hole-filled sky. Bodies skewered with pipes and other miscellaneous objects floated on by as if on a magnetic track. Only one lived in this chaotic scene, a silent figure who watched everything from a bench. Thumping music played. The screeching halt of a subway train was heard. A stink of piss and blood filled the air. The expressionless faces of the floating bodies suddenly shifted and their heads snapped over to the man watching. He looked up, face pitch black with wide white eyes that probed through time and space. A gaping hole opened up in front of him, full of nothing, as the bodies lunged forward.

Then Johnny opened his eyes. Again he was alive and awake, staring at the dirty subway floor. From his peaceful nap he emerged with another useless perspective on himself and where he was.

"This world sucks" he muttered silently. So he stood up, stepped carefully over the sleeping hobo at his feet and exited the transit station with his hands in his pockets. It was mid-afternoon, a bad time for a sociopath like him to be out and about, but it couldn't be helped. "Wasn't it night a second ago?" he asked himself. People strode on by with phones to their ears and over-eager faces. Off they went behind him, speeding off to an unknown doom.

"It's your world, isn't it?" the mystery voice said from an alley. Nny turned to glance at the brightly lit figure of the Victorian woman in startling gray. Her characteristically off-gray eyes under heavy black lids was illuminated by the orange glow of her cigarette on a stick.

"No it isn't" Nny said back, though not at her. "Existentialism becomes far to confusing at certain times. I'll stay with 'optimistically nihilist' from now on..."

"That sounds paradoxical" she replied, "like a god-fearing atheist."

"Or a rich hobo" Nny added, passing by a sleeping or dead man in rags. "There are a lot of homeless people around here, you know?"

"Hmm" she responded. A silence continued for a few more blocks. The buildings provided pockets of shade that Johnny slowed down in, like he needed the darkness to keep him going, before walking quickly down the street again. He got looks, as one often would, for wearing his choice of clothing. In the dawning of Autumn it is uncommon to see a man wearing a trench coat and a shirt that said 'Be Happy and Eat Cake' with a bloody caricature of some happy, hungry zombie. Even the weirder set of Gothic punks with piercings everywhere skin was exposed and skin that singed in the sunlight scoffed as they passed him.

"I've found" Nny began, under his breath so only his spectral audience could hear, "that the world operates in a very familiar fashion. There is always a reason why people do the things they do, but they never know what it is. Everything is a means with no end, a cyclical existence that everyone enjoys without real thought..."

"Sounds bad" the French voice in the alley. "What are you going to do about it?"

"What's to do?" Nny growled. "Humans are just animals, machines with no more complexity than a dog or fish. The only real exception is that Humans create other machines to help them do things they don't want to do. They're lazy machines."

"Again with the oxymoron" she observed. "Have you no better linguistic devices to use?"

"What about you?" Nny asked. "Couldn't you pick a better accent? Like Russian or German? German would be creepy as hell."

"Well, I'm part of your conscious" the ghostly woman reminded him. "You should have control over how I sound."

"Mmm?" Nny grunted. He smiled strangely, like his mouth was a straight line across his face, tilting his head quizzically.

"You know" she reiterated. "I'm your proverbial good side."

"Wasn't there a fat guy before?" Nny asked, his memories of days past very fuzzy and blurred by his more recent adventures.

"Yes" she said. "He was your primal side."

"Then what are you?" Nny asked.

"I" she said "am your Central Processor, you maniacal machine..."

* * *

"Why do you continue to paint?" asked she. It was night now. Johnny had spent the day walking about, looking at the pathetic people living pointless lives, as to his own philosophy for the day. Now, with the sun down and no light to critique him, he painted a mural on a condemned building. This time he painted his newest vision, his muse that visited him earlier.

"I paint because I feel like it" he gruffed, as if he wasn't satisfied with the answer. "These visions I get-"

"Dreams" she interrupted.

"VISIONS!" he snarled back, then snapped back to calm. "I feel compelled to paint, like someone has injected liquid 'idea' into my hands and I'll explode if it isn't released. Exploding is by far the least pleasurable way of dying to me."

"Not like you can die" she said. "It's like I told you, you're too important." Johnny's hand stopped. He kept his brush where it was but lowered his head, eyes glowing and smile extending manically. Then he started laughing, like what she said was hilarious. The laughter built to the point of some chaos inspiring madness was ringing out of his mouth. Cats in an alley started rolling around like they were on fire, homeless men and women went catatonic. Johnny's imperceptible laughter echoed through the cold air, cracking it apart. Then he stopped, suddenly apathetic and painting again.

"Who cares about me?" he asked. "I'm just a gear in the clock. Take me out and I can be replaced. Time may stop, but it can start back up."

"Says whom?" she said, stepping closer and tapping her cigarette a the end of the long handle. "Perhaps you are not a normal gear like all the rest. Perhaps you are a certain shape, one which is essential in the machine's operation. Then what would you do? If you removed yourself from the machine once more, time would just stop until you came back."

"Not if someone grows a brain and moves the hands manually" Nny said. "A clock doesn't have to count seconds exactly, you can just spin the hands around and make it whatever hour you want."

"Who would do that?" she asked.

"Whoever is good with clocks" he answered. "They're very sensitive machines..." The darkness of the conversation peaked at that point, and they both went into a silence. Nny continued to paint the smiling zombies and the sky filled with holes, which he didn't paint at all. Unlikely as it may be, he painted every detail and etched in every wrinkle on the inhumanly stretched grins with a purpose. And then another interesting topic came up.

"You know that humans act more on want than on need?" Nny said out of nowhere. His phantom said nothing. "I tried to reverse it. I failed. Is that where you came from? A burning, ash-colored reminder of my failure to destroy myself?"

"...you" she started thoughtfully, "aren't completely human. You are much more...divine."

"Pht" Nny scoffed. "I don't believe that at all. If I were really important I never would have died at all."

"But did you?" she said. Nny stopped again and grimaced under the shadows. "How are you sure it wasn't just some personal vision of yours? A dream? Or is it all really just one long dream that we can't perceive?" Nny became aggravated and drew out knife, keeping his brush where it was with the other hand. "Who knows what other people dream for their life to be like? Maybe there are people who have dreamed the same thing, and the world isn't blinked in and out of existence like you say it is!"

"That's existentialist!" Nny growled. "I said I'm nihilistic!"

"And yet you paint" she pointed out. Nny lowered his weapon and looked at the wall that bore his colorful, artistic blood. "If nothing heralds purpose, why do you continue to illustrate your visions to the world? Who would understand them? It is all pointless, Johnny C. Remember that next time..." Nny let her voice fade away, and he was aware that she had vanished as well. The street was silent save the occasional mew of a random cat. He took one final stroke and walked away, leaving his anonymous brush for the public to find next to his forgettable baby. Smiling zombies filled with horrid wounds and weaponry, all in front of a hole in which he painted a single, symmetrical roach.

"...my world sucks..."

* * *

"...and that's how the tiger got its 'spots'" the anchorman said, adding a chuckle to his redundantly obscene little story regarding a birth defect at a local zoo. Devi groaned and leaned into the corner of her chair, openly disgusted with the rate at which these senseless stories seemed to pile up endlessly. She was also disgusted because the volume was at the maximum level to drown out her roommates intentionally loud screams of erotica.

"Who the fuck cares?" Devi muttered. She leaned in to listen to what nonsense the reporters had next, but Tenna was getting louder. _Okay, I get it!_ Devi thought, holding her head in from exploding. _You're __having sex and I'm not. Shut up already!_

"...rather disturbing images" from the television caught her attention again "found on 33rd street here in Halloway. The painting, as it is, features a legion of smiling corpses floating just above the ground near what seems to be a symbolized sun of some kind. We will show you this mural but we warn you, it is graphic to some." And there it was. The definitive proof horror in the world. Devi didn't just fall from her chair, the chair fell from under her. She ran to her little art nook, stepping on discarded easel paper that overflowed her garbage can and looked at her latest painting. It was a replica, or an original, of the one shown on TV. Then Devi realized that she was now away from the TV that was providing her with information that could lead to some kind of mental breakthrough...or breakdown.

"Hey, Devi!" Tenna called, panting a bit as she spoke. She came from her bedroom, glistening in the hall light, with her bedsheet wrapped around her torso. "Someone copied your painting on TV!" When she got the living area, she could already see that her friend was intently focused on the TV, even pressing against it. "Uh, you can see better from farther away."

"Everything, Tenna" Devi madly muttered. "Whoever did this got every last detail correct! The hole, the zombies, even the bug in the middle!"

"I thought that was a smudge" Tenna admitted.

"This is crazy!" Devi nearly shouted, walking away and holding her head to keep it form blowing. "I'm sharing someone else's dreams! How is that not just...maddening!?"

"Calm down!" Tenna shouted, not adding to the calming effect she wanted. "Just take some painkillers and drink some booze!"

"That would kill me" Devi noted. She bit her thumb, glancing at the TV, which was now at commercial, and building a sinking nervous sickness in her gut. "...maybe it's a ghost..." she theorized.

"That could be possible" Tenna added. "We fought that ghost that one time."

"That was a kid" Devi said. "You taserd a ten year-old on Halloween, that wasn't really a ghost fight!"

"Yeah" Tenna said optimistically, "but the parents prosecuted both of us!" Devi stared at her and eventually shook her head.

"I need a cigarette..." Devi groaned, plopping down on the couch.

"No prob" Tenna said, marching back to her room. "Hey Dylan, get ready for round five!" Devi groaned and laid herself down to think about...things. Tenna marched out quickly to throw a fresh pack of sticks on her friend, then went screaming and whooping back to her bedroom to make more noise. Devi took two cigarettes and used them as effective earplugs, then lit on for herself.

"Something is wrong with the world" she thought out loud. "I don't know where I stand, or where I should stand to avoid the rain of shit, but I know I'm in no good place now. Somehow I can't help but think that someone, somewhere has already figured this all out..."

If he does or doesn't isn't important. The fact is, _he_ knows about it...


	21. Making Friends :D

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

For any youth, school is hard. For the Anti-christ, school is fun, a fine chance to hone one's extortion and organization skills, mostly of others organs. For the Anti-christ's adopted brother, school continued to be an ordeal. This time, however, he has the power of passive intimidation behind him, as well as a few scalped zombies for protection.

"Pepito?" Tod asked as he walked the halls with his brother. "Do these thing have to follow me all the time?"

"No" Pepito responded, "but I think it's a good idea for them."

"But,they follow me everywhere, including the bathroom" Todd complained.

"This is junior high school" Pepito said darkly. "Swirlies are still the number one cliché administered to threatening persons in a group mentality. You, _hermano_ are a quite important person to me..."

"Why?" Tod asked.

"Because you're my brother" Pepito honestly answered. "That should be enough of a reason."

"Oh" Todd realized. He felt a bit bad that he arrogantly questioned his brother's goodwill, and hung his head accordingly. Pepito was smoking in the halls, despite the obvious laws, and often blew smoke at the faces of scowling students and a few random older guys. They all just turned away and retreated without causing an upstart to the little devil.

"TODD!!" squealed young Lena. She appeared from nowhere and ran up to his side, giving him a hug and inhaling deeply along his neck. Todd awkwardly stared at her and tried to move away. "Mmm, you smell good today. I'm tempted to take a bite of you..."

"Don't" Pepito growled. "Anyone harming my brother gets an instant death penalty."

"Oh, lighten up, Peppy" Lena sneered. She turned cheerful and draped Todd's arm around her shoulder as they all walked through the long hall to their next class. "What are we going to do today?" she asked.

"The same thing we do everyday" Pepito began.

"Try and take over the world?" Todd joked. Lena snickered at the obvious joke but Pepito just apathetically dragged from his stick.

"Nah" he replied, "I have a whole life of work ahead of me for that shit. Let's open a betting pool and fuck with the odds instead."

"Yay!" Lena shouted, jumping up and down while holding the uneasy Todd. "Cheating at things is fun! Especially betting!"

"Uh...sure?" Todd said, unsure. He got through the rest of school with the vampiress clinging to him like so much static. He had discovered that there was nothing he could do short of letting her drain his blood to get her off of him. He also discovered that, even though she was only fourteen like he, she had many boyfriends before. They all mysteriously became lethargic and mindless around her for some unknown reason. She called it vampiric zombification. Todd called it 'creepy'.

At the end of the day, the varsity football team was set to play against an opposing district in the state. It was a home game, which meant good news for Pepito and his bracket, which he set up by the school gates. Using a nether-worldly disguise kit, he set up the charade of a toll guard who demanded some unorthodox information. Of course, most of the sheepish moms and miscellaneous relatives that came to watch their favorite player play the best game (and win) gave their information willingly. All of it was recorded on a parchment straight from Hell, binding all who signed it to a contractual obligation to pay cash money for an untaken bet.

"How do we do this again?" Todd asked once the game started.

"It's easy" Pepito explained. They sat up in the highest bleachers to avoid discussion with anyone/ "Whoever we get a profit from, we make them lose. Then, when they lose, we get the profit and spend it...or we don't. The end."

"Wait, that's it?" Todd said. To Pepito's surprise, he sounded rather surprised. "Don't we have to actually do something?"

"Nah" Pepito lazed. "Regardless as to how this all pans out, we'll get the money. It's all being wired to my Paypal account. As soon as the game's over, these people will all be out for quite a bit."

"That seems...way too easy" Todd noted.

"Well it is" Pepito said. "That's why it isn't our main activity. There's no challenge involved." Todd looked at his brother with a very curious look. He felt like he was being mislead to think that there was no real information available for him to really believe. Still, they watched the game with only half-hearted interest and waited for the money to come in.

* * *

"Ha!" Pepito sounded as he entered the door. "$276, _hermano! _Tell me that's not good!"

"I can't" Todd admitted. "It is pretty good for one night."

"Son?" Satan said from behind in his parental tone. "Have you been illegally acquiring money through rigged betting pools again?"

"Yes" Pepito proudly answered.

"You'll be a very good ender of days when you grow up" Satan praised. "How are you doing in school, Todd?"

"Very well" Todd answered respectfully, though very modestly.

"'Very Well' is a addendum to a statement, often a sarcastic one" Satan said. "It's not a good answer to a question..."

"Oh" Todd said, gathering another word to define himself with. "I'm doing good." Satan patted him on the head with his hot, bony hand and gave him some fatherly praise.

"Good" Satan said. "You boys play nice now. Don't make me get the broom up there."

"Yes sir" Todd called as he ascended the stairs. Satan glided off in his own direction to the living room while the boys retired to their own rooms.

"Hey _hermano_" Pepito said from Todd's bed, much to Todd's surprise. "That _cabrone_ RoninMusashi12 wants to be your friend. Should I sick some wolves on him?"

"No" Todd said, snapping away the control that was rightfully controlling his game at the time. "I'll see what he has to say..." Todd secured a headset to his face and clicked into the port on his controller, then he accepted the request and invited his new digital friend to a chat. He was invited first, so he accepted the invite.

"Yo!" a young man's voice greeted. "What's up, dude?"

"Not much" Todd responded. "I noticed you playing the other day. Is this sort of a clan thing?"

"Nah, clans are for fags" the other man said. "I just wanted to get you on my side."

"Wait" Todd said, "side for what?"

"You don't know?" the guy asked. "The power-geeks are going to be playing for the top rankings in the next week and I want to stop them. I can't do it alone, no matter how much I want to, and you seem to be the best at the 'Killer' game modes. With my tactile brawn and your homicidal brain, we could stop them all!"

"Well" Todd started, "why would you want to stop them?"

"Because" he began, "I like the top to be lonely. I'm very introverted. Right now I have the top ranking, and if more than twenty have the same rank, they all get divided based on recent achievements. That means for me, a guy who has already achieved everything in the game, I would have to wait a long time to get back up to the top again."

"But that's the point" Todd said. "You can't stay at the top forever..."

"...true" his friend admitted, "but at least this way I can stay up here for longer. What do you say?"

"Well, I guess so" Todd modestly agreed. "I have been looking for another reason to play beyond just rankings. But, one more question. Why me? There are plenty of great players out there besides me."

"No there aren't" the man casually argued. "There are plenty of great players, but I've seen you play. You don't just play it like a game, you play it with real...feeling. Real skill. It's like you're really out to kill the people you kill in the game. You treat it like a real killer would treat his life." Todd had nothing to say to that, and he certainly didn't agree.

"Well" Todd began, slowly, "I don't believe that...really. I just play it..."

"But you're really good at it" his friend said. "I'll prove it. Let's go into a game." Todd was now suddenly in his party, without even accepting an invite that he remembered to do so, and waited as the game loaded. It was a game of 'Wolves', the very game type that Todd was being praised for as a virtual murderer. "You'll see" the voice said. "No one's as good as you in here."

In some odd way, Todd was able to believe his new friend. Together, they started playing as best they could, staving off the hunting maniacs and slaughtering their victims in turn. Each round had the same victors, with Todd on top and his friend directly under him. The highest ranking player and his massively skilled friend played on through the night, discouraging so many people that the lobby was eventually reduced to the same ten people every match. As reluctant as Todd was to say so, he was the only one who was ever really winning. His team tried, but he always beat them to the proper point. Todd really was a great killer...in the game.

* * *

"OH MAI GAAHHDDD!!!" screamed a shrill and paranoid voice. Up on a hill, outside the city limits, in a planetarium and astronomical research station, a skinny, pasty scientist with a large head had fallen off his high perch and onto the cold floor of the lab. His associates quickly ran in to see him shaking and pointing from the floor at the telescope he had just fallen from.

"What is it!?" a fat, stubby doctor with goggles shouted.

"Oh" a skinnier, androgynous man or woman said with a nasal voice. "It's just him again. Let's go back to Hockey."

"You guys!" the startled scientist pleaded breathlessly. "I've seen it!"

"What?" the fat one started. "The light at the end of your ass?"

"Seriously, guy" the tall one said, "you need to get some help. All the time it's 'aliens' or 'zombies' or 'alien zombie-virus' bullshit. Enough. Let us get some sleep already."

"I'm positive this time!" the crazed one pleaded. "I have proof! I have high-speed camera pictures of something entering the atmosphere! I calculated the trajectory too, and it's coming from another planet outside our solar system!" The other scientists, while amused by the wild rantings of their colleague, scoffed him quietly and slipped out of the room unnoticed. "Something, someone has found us! If it doesn't burn up in entry it'll most likely land in the mountains! We need to call the FBI! They need to know about thi-" of course, now he realized that he was barking madly at the moon. He twisted his face with anger and stomped over to the telescope again. After a careful adjustment, he was locked on a sharply descending light in the sky.

"Mock me all you want" he lowed to himself "but I'm right. I know I'm right. That's an alien, just like the ones that tried to kill me when I was a boy! They're back, and they're probably looking for their friend's body in my basement!" Then, shocked, he looked up from the telescope and made an astute observation of the word 'basement' and correlated it to 'home'. "OHGAHGOD! MOM! I have to warn her!" He ran out, slipping on the floor again as he left, and slammed the door. The rock in the sky, seen only by this one, unknown and unreliable man, continued rapidly towards its destination in the mountains, undetected and unseen. It was a rock of black-steel with a red tint, black so much that the fire refused to illuminate it against the already black sky. It was just big enough to crush a house if there was one in the hills, and it carried something evil within. What it was...

...who could say?


	22. New Player

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

The hours passed slowly in the world of the killers. Sam continued his work as the president of his massive corporation, Mort and Tom continued their friendship from Tom's apartment and Yvonne continued to be a total bitch.

"What the FUCK!?" Yvonne shouted. She resided in a temporary apartment building which she had bought, renovated and refashioned into a smaller version of her throne room from her original castle. Pink was everywhere, including the outside and even in the street where her limousine was parked. Everyone in town knew some celebrity was in town, but they never saw her leave. "Is this Raspberry Tea!?"

"Yes, ma'am" the hired hand said apologetically. She winged the glass of drink into his head and it shattered, sending him to the ground.

"I demand Pink Lemonade!" Yvonne shouted, unaware of the irony for having anything else pink in the sickeningly pink area. "Service! Worker number four has collapsed! Throw him out back with the rest of the filth!" At her whim, four men came rushing in, took up the elderly butler and rushed him out through the back door. The back lot was opened to the streets and greeted passersby with a sign that said 'Used property for Sale'. The unusable or otherwise unsuitable servants that Yvonne expended were forbidden to leave until someone came to pick them up for a price...

"Dammit! Servants!" she hollered. The same four beefy gentlemen came instantly. "Is the phone still plugged in?"

"Yes, your highness, it is" one of them answered. Special Forces Marines who went out of work recently...this is where they work now. One of them had a fake leg, another had a prosthetic heart valve, one even wore an eye patch. Where she found her servants and workers was an utter mystery. "There has still been no word from anyone regarding he next 'mark'."

"Shit" Yvonne cursed. "This tedium is going to make me crazy...prepare the car! I wish to take a drive!"

"Yes, your highness!" the soldier-servants quickly saluted. Yvonne got up and walked over to the wall of the room to press a button. The four men left and, an hour later, Yvonne came out with a drastically changed look. Her hair was newly dyed, a deep icy blue to match her uniquely Gothic makeup. Her eyes were heavy with black that faded into the same blue as it seemed to drip down her cheek. Her lips were black, her collar was black, her stiletto boots were black and crusty with blood stains. She wore spiked bracelets, a stitched skull ornament on her shoulder and virtually nothing else. Her corset was now made of metal that covered her midriff and elevated her bosoms, making her look disproportionate and anime-like. The corset ended just barely short of her lingerie panties that flashed briefly as she walked. Adjusting this costume for comfort seemed like it would be a nightmare.

"Ready to go, your highness" a servant reported as he held open the door. Yvonne walked inside the spacious car and sat down. She struggled to find a comfortable spot that wouldn't blatantly expose her nether regions, but began to realize how futile the attempt was.

"Damn" she huffed. "I should have worn something else. I feel too exposed in this now..."

"Where to, your highness?" the driver called back.

"Into the foothills outside the city" Yvonne commanded. With none of her man-servants present, she lazed back into her cushion and spread out her legs. "Perhaps some solitude will take my mind off this dusty little city."

"Yes, your highness" he saluted. The car was off and went racing to the city limits with the princess of murder on board.

* * *

"Esteemed board members!" the crazy scientist announced to a gathering in the foothills. "You know why you have been called here. Today, in approximately one half hour, we will witness a cosmic wonder!"

"Yes" a bearded German scientist mused. "We have read your report. The trajectory and calculations of the object point it to land right here."

"It's a miraculous discovery" an older lady said. "We owe it to you, sir, that we are here to observe this remarkable event today."

"Thank you" the scientist said modestly. "I can verily take all the credit here today." With that aside, he sneered to his colleagues in the audience. "Now then, I can assume we all know how dangerous it is to be near anything falling at velocity. Therefore, I suggest that we all adjourn to the bunker that was erected last night for our protection." One of the men in the audience raised his hand. "Yes, sir?"

"Is that bunker really safe?" he asked. "If we can assume that the object will create the crater that our computers have projected, the force of impact may shake it to pieces."

"Impossible" the young presenter announced confidently. "The bunker is made from the most dense material with seven foot think reinforcements keeping the roof up. Nothing short of a black hole could destroy it. And the better news is that it is easily moved from place to place, as it comes in separate parts."

"Granted" another scientist, this time one relating to the bunker itself "each piece requires massive amount of manpower to transport."

"Indeed" the androgynous scientist said. "We had hoped those military mechas would be used for military purposes."

"Why are we debating this?" the presenting scientist asked. "The object is still incoming! I wasn't exactly making an idle suggestion. I was telling you all that if we don't move, we're dead!" The scientists didn't realize that. They assumed it was a casual convention and that the starting observation grounds wouldn't be _on_ the projected landing site. The esteemed members of the board and other working lab coats made a mad dash on their all-terrain Segues to the bunker, which was prepared two hills over. Each station had a telescope for the observers to watch as the meteor impacted in its designated spot.

"Make sure your goggles are secure" a computerized announcement said "and that your feet are in a proper position. Please place your headphones on when the green light is on. Do not remove your safety equipment until the red light is off. In case of an emergency, please exit through the east door in an orderly fashion..." And so the scientists waited. Meanwhile, Yvonne's luxury cruiser went along the winding back roads of the peaceful hills. The terrible girl hung out the window, twirling a pistol in her hand.

"So peaceful" she said, "but so boring. I wish I wouldn't have passed out when I was fighting that spider bitch. I have the strangest inkling that she raped me...my chest has been feeling oddly sore ever since then. Oh well. Even if she did cop a feel, she's dead now, somehow..." As she twirled her pistol, unaware as to why the sky was so very orange, her hair started to whip at her face.

"Agh!" she exclaimed. "I should have kept my hair the same." In her mindlessness, she accidentally fired a shot. The car screeched to a halt and the marine servants turned into bodyguards.

"Get on the floor, you highness!" on ordered. Yvonne, completely aware of what really happened, ducked down to humor them. Unfortunately, by some astronomical coincidence, her stray bullet went through the sky and hit, of all things, the approaching meteor. Of course, that incremental change in its trajectory now sent it barreling towards the bunker of scientists at T-minus thirty seconds to landing.

"Oh, Newtonian hell..." the meteor's founder said with great ironic dread. The bunker instantly heated up, the super-thick metal creating a blast furnace from within. Everyone who didn't get incinerated was obliterated as the space metal landed squarely on top of them, blowing the bunker all the way to heaven...

* * *

Yvonne and her bodyguards endured the unearthly tremors that followed the explosive crash and set out to investigate. The threatening Yvonne stayed far ahead of her marksmen protectors for fear that they would see her taut panties and notice that she wet herself.

"Leather was a bad choice" Yvonne told herself. "Metal was the worst. Note to self: Never wear metal again!" She was ashamed of herself, but masqueraded a perfect poise only capable of her ladyship as she walked over the hill toward the horribly scorched ground. The meteor had burned away the very dirt where it landed. Sharp hills of shrapnel from the now non-existent bunker jutted out from the deep hole.

"Your highness!" one of the servants shouted from behind. Yvonne turned with a start. "Please, we advise you to stay away from the crater! It may be radioactive or poisonous!"

"Poisonous?" Yvonne sarcastically repeated. "You joking! There's no such thing as space poison, you morons...although" she now said to herself, "I should keep a safe distance. These boots are my favorite, and I don't want them to melt." So she softly treaded on the crackling, broken ground over to the massive crater. It was much wider that deep, however. Even the meteorite that caused it could be seen a bit from where she stood. "...amazing!..." she gasped. Although perfectly aware of the danger, her feet walked forward as if there was none. Her guards wordlessly rushed up and tried to stop her. She stopped herself, just before her guards, at the outer edge of the crater.

"It's beautiful!" Yvonne squealed. "Just think, this wonderful little rock scoured the entire cosmos just to find me! It must really want to be mine!" The guards looked at each other with serious doubt, but said nothing. "Well, what are you waiting for!? Go get it!"

"Uh...we can't?" a guard replied. Yvonne shot him an angry glare.

"It's a meteorite" another said. "It probably weighs a few tons."

"Does anyone else smell piss?" yet another guard sounded off.

"Enough!" Yvonne commanded. She grew paranoid that her accident would be discovered. "I don't care how it's done, this thing is mine! Go call someone with a crane and have it flown back to my castle in Europe!"

"Yes, your highness" one guard saluted. He ran off and went to the car to deliver this much more reasonable command to a nearby source of heavy machinery.

"We should secure a perimeter" one guard said, unknowingly edging on Yvonne's anger. "In case anyone else come by."

"You should step back" the other guard offered. Yvonne was about to snap, but something caught her attention. A cockroach climbed calmly out of the wreckage. It was such a startle that her legs went weak instantly and she dropped to gaze at it.

_Jesus Christ!_ She exclaimed, reaching out for the little thing. _These things really can survive anything! That's astounding._

"You should step away from here now, your highness" the guard now said with a militant command. Yvonne glared up at him. She stood up, put her hands on her hips and began to assert her command. The guards present were torn apart with one swift, unseen slash from a horrible weapon. Yvonne stood shock-still as the blood and dust cleared away. Standing nearly eight feet tall was a stick-thin figure, skin all black, nails as long and sharp as claws which dripped with the blood and bile of the soldiers it had just killed.

It's head was remotely human in shape, but no eyes. It resembled a skeleton with tightly wrapped burnt skin all around it with a cape draped around its shoulder area. This thing, this alien monster, bent down to face Yvonne head on. She quivered with fear. It opened its mouth which extended from one end of its head to the other and was full of dagger-sharp teeth. Now that it was close, she could see how warped and wrinkled its head seemed to be. She could also see two long antennae as they unfurled and draped over her blue head of hair.

_Hello_ a raspy voice echoed in her mind. _Is this...Earth?_ Yes, it was talking to her. Once she realized that, she fainted and wet herself again. _...Hello?..._


	23. The Daredevil Deal

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

"Okay" Yvonne began, "so I gather that you're an alien?"

_Correct_ it communicated. Though its mouth didn't open except when it ate or growled, it was able to relay its thoughts directly to her. _I was sent here for a special mission of universal importance..._

"Really?" Yvonne asked, acting sarcastic. Now that a spare limo was here and she had to explain that the cockroach was supposed to be in it, her driver's constant nagging was making her extremely agitated. He was a bug-phobic kind of person, one she would kill as soon as they were back home again. "And what mission may that be?"

_I'm not sure yet_ the alien admitted. _I only rode the cosmic winds to find this place. I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing here... _Yvonne humphed back into her seat, keeping her legs firmly crossed now that her panties were off. Regardless of whether it had eyes or not, she wouldn't flash anything under any given circumstance. _I have a question for you, if I may._

"What?" Yvonne asked.

_Are there any particular wars going on in the world today?_ It asked.

"Well, there were" she answered. "About two years ago, the government of this country pulled out of the country they were attacking because they had lost morale in the rest of the world. It was a really pointless war. Now, of course, there's a financial crisis that's still looming, despite the world's best efforts, so I suppose that's a war of sorts..."

_Economy has no place in conflict_ the alien rasped. _Wars are fought to gain what cannot be gained through peace. Land, treasures, glory, or simply lives. A primitive species' form of currency should have no right place within a warring society, for the barter system can easily replace any form of currency with enough push and incentive. Take away a planet's money and they will find new ways to cope. That's what I've found in my travels._

"How old are you?" Yvonne asked, wondering why she was so interested all of a sudden.

_Time is relative _the thing answered. _I have existed long enough, but not longer than others, let's say._

"And why do you transform into a cockroach?" Yvonne prodded.

_My smaller form is one of significance over function_ it admitted. _I chose it long ago when I found such a creature in the universe that survived the destruction of a planet with me. It became my friend, existing an umpteenth longer than its host species, and so I mimicked it as best I could. I still use my normal form to accomplish my tasks, but my 'cockroach' form is for living without fear of death._

"Cockroaches die too, you know" Yvonne said. "Just squash them good and they won't move around ever again."

_But soon thereafter_ it started, _dozens more come from the walls and open areas. They are infinite, hideous though they are, and shall survive to rule this place long after it has been blown away by the cosmic dust._

"So you're here" Yvonne started, trying to get back on topic, "but you don't know why?"

_Yes_ it answered.

"Can you only communicate with me?" she asked, suddenly seeming very interested in its answer.

_No_ it answered. _As long as something has a mind with which to think, I may influence it to hear me._

"Interesting..." Yvonne lowed. "I have an idea then. If I could possibly help you find out what you're here to do, would you help me with what I'm doing now?"

_Perhaps_ the alien answered. _Firstly, how can you help me? From what I've observed so far, you urinate far too often to do any profitable work_. Yvonne ignored that comment because she still refused to part her legs to grab the gun next to her and plant her feet so killing the thing across from her wouldn't smash her against the car door.

"I happen to know a very important person" she explained "who can get you anything you want, including information. He can meet with you and tell you what your mission is, then you can accomplish it and leave! That's what you want right?"

_Yes_ it replied. _Also, for the sake of convenience, I believe I should have a title of some kind. Something other than cockroach..._

"Hmm" Yvonne hummed as she thought. "How about Beelzebub? It's a name that holds great merit on this planet..." The alien cocked its head and thought for a while about the name.

_Beelzebub_ it repeated. _Yes, that shall do. Fair enough, girl. I will help you if you can help me in the end as well..._

"Great!" Yvonne chirped. "It's a deal!"

* * *

A phone was ringing in the city. A hard-pressed intern rushed to answer it in the corporate office where he worked.

"Crap!" he exclaimed at the stack of papers he already held. "I'll just, set these down here..." He set down the flimsy stack and picked up the phone. "Noche International. This is Dennis in accounting, how may I say this call is for?" A roaring hiss of unintelligible words sounded through the lines. The greasy teen's eyes rolled back and turned pitch black as the garbled demon-speak came through. "Yes, I'll let him know" he replied. He hung up the phone, glided past his stack of papers and let them fall over while he made a break for the stairs.

"There you are!" a fat, jaded worker said, stepping in front of the possessed youth. "Where are my files! I explicitly asked for them to be-" Dennis grabbed him by the collar bone, sinking his fingers through his thick skin, and pulled him over. He whispered something in tongues and threw his superior to the ground, continuing on his way upstairs. No one else saw this happen, of course, because they were all to busy, and the fat man was left to gurgle himself to death.

Dennis ascended the stairs with inhuman speed. His legs pumped more blood than his body had ever pumped before. He finally reached the topmost floor, knocked out the security at every corner and approached his goal.

"The target has been chosen" said Dennis with a new, Spanish accent. Samuel leaned in his chair to listen. "The address and information is in the process of being faxed to you through our network."

"Hell has a fax network?" Samuel asked.

"Yes" Dennis mechanically answered.

"Very well" Sam said, standing up from his desk. "I shall await them as patiently as possible. However, you seemed to cause quite a ruckus downstairs with that body. I'll have to get rid of it." From the shadows he raised up his gun. The startling explosion from his hand-cannon woke up all the incapacitated guards outside his room. Before they could get to the office of their honored president, the body was gone and Sam was back at his desk, all the evidence of on-sight murder erased instantly...

As Sam received his official invoice via possessed teenager, Tom and Mort got their news in their own way far across town.

"There!" Tom shouted. "Up there!"

"Where's there?" Mort asked. He had finally given in to his friends request to accompany him in a light gaming venture and was getting quickly overwhelmed by the 'Hard' difficulty setting, which was the easiest that Tom would willingly play on.

"Top left!" Tom shouted. Mort leaned into his thumb drive and aimed at a villain, then shot him with a tensed, pouting mouth.

"Got him!" Mort happily announced.

"That's great but you're dying there" Tom quickly said. Mort reverted his concentration back to the game and got to watch his character brutally die, getting splattered into a cloud of chunky blood.

"Ah" Mort groaned. "I'm too old for games. My hands don't work like yours do."

"It's not the hands" Tom explained, "it's the brain. Your brain must be really old not to handle this crappy game."

"I thought it was a well done presentation" Mort argued.

"It's bland" Tom clarified. "The levels are overdone, just basic walkways and net-patterns with lots of visual garbage. Nothing really stands out in the overall design. It's boring..."

"What about that other game you play all the time?" Mort asked, as if there was one. Tom knew which one he meant, and kept it close to the console that played it at all times in case of emergency boredom.

"Those maps are much more randomly-made" Tom explained. "Even if you played the game from its release day, you still can't have every corner of every map covered with strategy. There's always someone who gets smart and uses something in a way you've never seen before. The environment is expansive, interactive, and creepy as all hell."

"INCIDENTALLY!" a phantasmal voice shouted from the TV. Tom rolled backwards while Mort sprang to his feet. "I have news regarding 'All Hell'." Tom looked up and saw the phantom from before, the one that helped him achieve total ranking perfection and whisked him away to the life of a competitive killer, inside the game.

"That's awesome!" Tom exclaimed into the headset. "Just let me turn down the volume a bit..."

"Is this better?" the demon asked again.

"Yes" Mort said. "Does this regard the next target?"

"Indeed it does" the demon said. "I have the address and information for you both with me here. Now that the underworld is aware of your alliance, we trust that all the information that goes to one will go to you both, correct?"

"Sure thing" Tom affirmed. "Having a clueless opponent in the end would be boring."

"Now then," it continued in the TV, "here it is:..."

* * *

And at that same time, Yvonne received a text message from an 'unreachable sender'. The message was written in a form of code that she stared at long and hard to decifer before deciding on preemptively testing her new ally's worth.

"Read this for me" she demanded of Beelzebub, her comrade from space.

_Can't you?_ It asked.

"It's in code" she said. "Use your alien powers and read it."

_It's not in code_ it explained to her. _This is the language of the far eastern hemispherical country 'China'. It contains what seem to be whereabouts..._

"This must be it!" Yvonne exclaimed. "Write it down in English, _s'il vous plait!_"

_Choose one language, please_ it asked kindly. It scrawled down the contents of the message with its space-black claw on a piece of paper while daintily handling the oddly square phone with its other set of bony sword-sharp fingers. When it was finished, it handed both things over to the princess who cleared the text and read the information. She gazed up from the paper with an evil smile and knocked on the padded luxury wall behind her.

"Oh, driver?" she called.

"Yes, your highness?" he responded through the speaker.

"Can you make a detour?" she cutely asked, standing up. "There's something I need to do before returning home..."

"Where are we going, your highness?" the overly cautious driver asked. She picked out a gun from the hidden arsenal, accidentally showing her butt as she bent down to retrieve it, and loaded it onto her back. Then she picked a bat, a good titanium one, and swung it around in her spacious limo compartment for practice.

"Just a bit out of town..." she sweetly said. Beelzebub watched on with his unseen eyes, observing everything he could about his newest living host. In all his expeditions, he had never seen someone with such massive killing intent, such pleasure in the thought of rampant murder.

_...to kill a sick man..._ Beelzebub thought to itself. _...one that lives far away, one that can never have company that has gotten involved with the organization called 'Hell'. What random job is this that she seems to love so much? Something I've never seen or learned of before...it must be cosmic fate that I met this pantles woman..._


	24. The Account of the Lonely Old Man

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

"...a little about myself?" an old man asked his interviewer. "Sure. Why not? What would you like to know?" and while he talked, his hands worked at painting a mural from his wheelchair.

"What is your name, for the record?" a voice asked from a voice box, the interviewer in question hiding in the shadows of the man's basement den.

"Eli" he replied. "Eli Johnston."

"Mr. Johnston" the interviewer began, "what led you to this hobby?"

"Well" the old man began, "around my second marriage, I began to realize the importance of alone time. She was a good wife, a caring wife, but always a bit picky about our time. We sat down for dinner and then we went about our ways. That's the marriage I wanted all along. Unfortunately, one of her ways was with another man. I felt isolated and alone, so I came down here one day and...I started painting. I've been painting ever since. All the way through my six marriages."

"Have your failed marriages attributed to the content of your paintings?" the interviewer prodded. "Have they affected your feelings in a way that come through with your painting?"

"No" Eli replied. "I just paint...whatever I please. My emotions have no place in my work, they never have."

"Do you feel lonely when you paint?" was the question.

"Loneliness has a time and place" was the answer. "If I must feel lonely to be alone with my paint, then so be it. I don't mind it, of course."

"Would you feel better if you had some company?"

"Not particularly. Everyone takes to much enjoyment in critiquing my art."

"Some would say that art is meant to be appreciated and critiqued."

"I would agree with the first part, of course, but not the latter. All forms of art have beauty and flaws, and pointing those flaws out can be insulting to an artist who only observes the overall beauty he creates."

"Are you nervous?"

"About what?"

"Tonight"

"Not at all. Any fan of art that may come to me is welcome."

"No one's been in this house in years. Do you wonder why?"

"Of course I don't" he said, finishing his painting and putting away his brushes at last. "I can't honestly blame them. My home is far away enough to cause anyone problems when coming here. That and, of course, my welcome."

"What about it?" asked again.

"It's not the warmest." And so the old man wheeled himself weakly away to the opposite wall which glowed with monitors. An expansive warehouse that led to a dilapidated recreation of his own home where he resided stretched out. Boxes and walls made a terrifying maze of cramped darkness through the entire place with terrible hidden pitfalls and deadly traps around every and any corner. "With any luck, I'll get some company for at least a few minutes..." The interviewer, a demon with no lower jaw and only a fragment of an upper one, ducked from the shadows and slipped into absolute nothingness.

"I can only hope, Elmira" he mused to the wall he painted, "that we can get some company tonight." The corpse with no head he had diligently painted like a colorful, dream-like vision didn't respond. It just hung by the staples and nail that held it tight to the wall it was painted into with the other headless, perfectly preserved women.

* * *

In the middle of the backwooded country-side, the killers arrived. First was Sam in his private, all-terrain vehicle. Soon thereafter was Yvonne with clean, black lace panties covered by black stockings and a curious cockroach ornament in her hair. Later, Tom and Mort arrived via a rented, worn-the-hell-out car.

"Sorry we're late" Mort apologized. "Thomas here went as fast as he could and killed a few cops doing so."

"Well, now they have a job to do!" Tom argued. "They'll never find us, either. They never saw our faces." Once he was done pleading his case, he locked onto Yvonne's over-exposed body wrapped air-tight in leather. "Hey there" he slyly said. "You dyed your hair." Yvonne, not wanting to cause an unnecessary scene in front of her alien audience atop her head, just temptingly smirked and edged in.

"Oh?" she moaned. "You noticed? I thought some change would be nice..."

"Don't go to hard on those things" Sam said, loading and checking his miraculous gun. "Too much hair dye can make your hair fall out and get diseased."

"Maybe yours can" she shot back, "but mine are all natural."

"So not everything you do is poison to something else" Mort said, serious as ever with his shovel in ready hand. Yvonne growled at him and lined up. "As per our rules" Mort began, "we all enter at once. If we don't meet after, then we can assume that we are dead. If we are informed that we have won the challenge from Hell, we inform everyone else and appropriately deal with the punishment otherwise."

"Indeed" Sam agreed. They all stood before the entrance in question, a wild growth-infested aluminum hollow that expanded like a mountain into the dark, night sky. It was a mountain in some rights, one of death that held within its own mountain of corpses and lost souls. The engineering marvel of killing intent, the ultimate death trap as designed by the most maligned mind Hell has ever given debt. Their target was Eli Johnston, the man who built the Mansion of Mourning.

"From Morning till Night" Tom said snidely, "all we do is fight and fight."

"Not quite" Mort added, keeping with the rhyme."

"No more rhyming!" Yvonne shouted. "Let's spread out a bit more." Everyone edged farther away from each other until they had an appropriate distance between themselves. It was agreed by Tom and Mort that they would work as closely as possible, Yvonne would count on Beelzebub in disguise or not for assistance, and Sam...no one understood Sam's intentions.

"Let's go" Sam commanded. They all walked in careful step until they crossed the threshold of the temple doors. Then, with a metallic whine, a huge metal door dropped behind them. They didn't care an let it drop, crashing to the ground with the speed and force that could crush anything that dared to beat it.

"Welcome" a recorded, dramatic voice announced through the echoing halls. "Before you lies a heated maze of death and dread. At the end of that maze is me, the mastermind behind your capture..." The Killers suddenly realized just what this endeavor was really about. "...I wish you the best of luck. May your mind guide you the right way...and may your body hopefully agree with it..." Then a laugh started, one not from a man but an audience. A laugh track.

"He's already mocking us..." Mort observed. Sam cocked his gun with a spine-shivering click.

"Old school rules" Sam said. "First one there wins."

"No one helps after they get there" Yvonne said, glaring at Sam from the corner of her eye.

"We can only watch them fight or die" Tom finished. "Let's be off, then" Mort said. Sam departed to the far right where he stood, sprinting through a set-up dinning room into a black room. Yvonne went up the stairs and flew into what looked like a bathroom from the ground floor. Tom and Mort nodded at each other and, disregarding the one-for-all tenant of their rules, departed together to the far left through a sitting room and into a sudden garden. Eli watched them all and pressed the switches next to him as they became useful to him.

* * *

Sam's room continued to be pitch black, which he treated as an asset rather than a hindrance. He felt a kind of fresh plaster all over the walls that he never felt before. It was like latex-based paint on rubber. Part of him, his most humane and thoughtful side, didn't want to see these walls no matter what. He did know, however, that the walls were the safest place to be. Eli could see his potential for reaching him, as there was a giant hole in the floor adorned with razor spikes and many corpses that had been reduced to anguished skeletons.

"Good" Eli praised to himself. He reached over to a panel covered in different switches, each representing a trap of some sort, and flipped one. "Let's make it harder..." Unseen but heard, the room started shifting. Sam clung desperately to the strange wall as he felt the floor beneath him rumbling softly. Then it stopped and he carefully continued, not knowing just how much of the floor along the walls was now replaced by razor wire and deadly spikes.

Next, Eli watched over the curious young girl who made her way through the infinite bathroom. Every few meters or so, the bathroom would repeat, always getting a little smaller and closed in. The toilets overflowed with some horrid bile made of decomposed human remains and skeletons were positioned in the shower stalls as evil shadows coming from the wall.

"He has quite the body collection" Yvonne said.

_Well over a hundred _Beelzebub informed her. _This man has killed many humans without regret and made them this way. He sounds quite mad, disturbed or possessed even. Before you kill him, I wish to study him and interrogate him if I may._

"Fair enough" Yvonne said. "I suppose it's the least I can do for your help right now. You're fine with that until I can get you a meeting with the Devil, right?"

_The end shall justify the means_ Beelzebub said. _So long as I can find my purpose here, I care not how I can help you. I shall without hesitance or regret as thanks._

"Good" Yvonne said, now stopping. There was no room to walk anymore and the rooms had ended with a wall. Scrawled in ancient and faded blood and...other liquid was the warning 'Run Away! He has no mind for things like Mercy...' "What does that mean?" Yvonne asked. She turned around and silently began to panic. The wall was right behind her, this one scrawled and scratched upon until the very dirt that enforced it was showing. Inside that dirt was a skull.

The air became thin and startling, the light seemed to dim as the fluorescent bulb began to flicker dementedly. Eli's wrinkled, tired face attempted to crack a smile. No one had used his bathroom in quite some time, and watching the illusion work was gratifying to him.

_What's wrong?_ Beelzebub asked, sensing her panic.

"I'm claustrophobic" Yvonne explained. "It means I'm afraid of cramped, dark places. This is really freaking me out..."

_This wall is hollow_ Beelzebub pointed out. _It's thick, but filled only with dirt. I can dig through it if you require exit._

"Yes, good..." Yvonne stuttered. "Wait, which way is my target?"

_Through the solid wall_ Beelzebub pointed out. _It would be much more troublesome to dig through, and It doesn't go anywhere. It would seem here that your options are limited. The purpose of this trap is to escape it, but which direction is a pressing concern. You can go the way you came, pry apart the toilet and exit through the piping, or through the shower there..._

"Shower?" Yvonne asked. She yanked down the curtain, let the skeleton covered in putrid maggots fall on her and pushed it off. The wall had been ripped away and tunneled through, revealing a hole that was burrowed and bordered by the bones of the fallen on all sides. The most obvious answer of escape that no one sane would check. "Why didn't you point that out first!?" she roared at the cockroach.

_It seemed to obvious_ it replied. _I thought you were here partly for the challenge of fighting a worthy killing mind._

"Fuck that" Yvonne growled, widening her smile to mad proportions. "As long as I win, I don't care. You'll help me cheat my way through here, understand?"

_...I understand_ Beelzebub honestly said. The prospect of game had no purpose with his host. And neither did it with he. All that mattered were the ends, not the means. If the means would fail, so would they both, and then the end would never come again. So Yvonne blindly and arrogantly breezed through the catacombed cavern, kicking aside and breaking apart the underfoot bones and skulls of those that went before her, always listening for her helper. Eli witnessed her mad, one-sided conversation firsthand, and became mad...


	25. At the Mansion of Madness

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Tom and Mort had come to an immediate dead end in their path. They had wandered into a fully furnished kitchen at some point and had the door behind them locked down, keeping them from their captive point and able to look out the window across the death-splattered yard of grass to their next objective. Their gracious host had provided a row of lights to guide them from the door out of the kitchen to the elaborately decorated basalt cavern across the dark yard.

"It's a trap" Tom said.

"Of course it is" Mort agreed. "Those skeletons out there wouldn't lie to any man, would they?" Indeed, the skeletal remains of some invasive people were scattered and broken across the overgrown, uncared lawn. The borders of the yard weren't greatly visible due to the unfocused illumination, but they seemed odd and out of place.

"We should just sprint across" Tom said. "Maybe we can outrun whatever killed them." Mort stared and hummed thoughtfully at the scene.

"Unlikely" Mort said. "Observe." Mort retrieved his trusty shovel and, cautiously, held it outside the door. Nothing happened. There were very, very feint clicks and a slowing whir after them, but nothing else.

"What am I looking at?" Tom asked.

"One moment" Mort asked. He found the stove and heated his shovel blade in the gas fire. He went to turn it off and blow out the light, but he couldn't.

"_And now you see the marvelous power of the Mark 1800 GasGriller!_" the mechanical voice announced. This time it was an entirely cropped voice from what seemed to be an infomercial. "_No matter what, the light won't go out! No winds or storms will blow this baby out! Watch! I'll blow on it, hard as I can, and it won't go out!!!_" The transmission cut out then, apparently relaying the message that the light wouldn't go out.

"That's problematic" Mort said.

"How so?" Tom asked.

"If we can't get the flame out or open the door and leave," Mort explained, "this room will become a gas chamber and we'll suffocate. However, if I'm correct..." Mort carefully drew out his shovel into the yard again. This time, the clicks were followed by a high, screeching whine and a rapid succession of arrows with silver tips flew out from the walls. They were deflected off the ancient shovel's hardened metal, but Mort had readily proved his point and withdrew his shovel once more.

"Heat sensors" Tom said. "Smart."

"Not only that" Mort said, "but those arrows seem to have some toxic residue on them..." His observation was brought up when he saw the curious wet spots that oozed from the scratches the arrows made.

"Damn" Tom said. "Looks like we're screwed."

"Of course we're not" Mort argued, sheathing his shovel. "The winds of destiny blow strong through these corridors, and I can feel them tugging me onward. If there's a way, we will find it!" The boys took a moment to think about their current situation, but came up with ideas that held scarce amounts of possibility.

"Can they pierce all metals?" Tom asked.

"Hopefully not" Mort said. To that end he opened the refrigerator, ignored the horrid stench of all the rotting and rotted corpses that were chaotically stuff within and held the paneled door over the flame for a few seconds. Then, he held the heated spot over the green ground. The arrows hit and stuck to it, not piercing the whole way through. Mort carefully retrieved the arrows and threw them back out, seeing that only the left wall fired the arrows with such heinous force.

"Here's the plan" Mort began...

* * *

Elsewhere in the hideous compound, Sam had survived his ordeals through some unknown miracle and busted down the next door in his way. He was now in a room decorated with the mad scrawlings of some terrible madman just previous to his untimely doom. The scratches and scribbles seemed as freshly made as the rest of the mocking structure, with the shavings and cracks in the wall without dust around them. The blood that stained the floor was recently dried. Also, there was some strange thing in the center of the room.

Whatever it was, it looked like it was responsible for whatever gore had occurred in this room previously, so Sam paid it no mine. It was a connecting pattern of curious, glowing orbs that spun around slowly in a large glass cylinder. The connecting plates and arms were fashioned of beautiful gold and brass, emblazoned with jewels that could only be of some horrible alien origin.

"_Aren't you curious?_" the old Eli asked over the speaker system. "_Isn't it a tantalizing thing there? Won't you look into it?_" Sam didn't waver. He continued across the short room, not even bothering with glancing at the walls a second time, and proceeded to the door.

"My only real interest is in killing you..." Sam said.

"_It can predict you future_" Eli offered. Sam stopped. Perhaps the concept of seeing what was predestined was just amusing enough for him to give the object a glance. However, such notions still didn't phase him, and he unpaused to continue out of the room and into the next. It was a much larger room with a myriad of terrible machinations made from hideous, rusted shrapnel. It seemed to be a rushed project at the time of its building, and now reflected that upon Sam's glasses. Eli hadn't anticipated him to advance through that room so quickly and failed to start up the traps in time. Once he started them from his master control, it took a while for them to warm up.

"Weak" Sam said. He broke off in an instant sprint, dashing through the whirring machines and amalgamations of bladed horror before they could even begin to click into motion. He ignored whatever great plans and blueprints were drawn when this room was made and advanced up to the final trap. It seemed impossible, continuously picking up speed. A fence of rushing, gusting blades that were rusted with blood started whirring beyond any normal or mechanically safe speed just in front of the exit.

"_Quite the valiant effort_" Eli complimented, "_but all in vain. You shall not kill me today, young man. No one has ever gotten past this most brilliant design of mine in one whole piece..._"

"Well then" Sam said, retrieving his gun. "Let us match our 'impossibilities', shall we? You see, this is no normal gun. It is crafted from a metal that is thusfar unknown to modern metalsmithing science. It's a super light alloy of helium-enriched depleted uranium code-named 'Hein Compound #12'. The bullets are made from laser-crafted fragments of meteorites and deep-sea nodes of super-concentrated salt. When the bullets impact upon something solid, the force they exert becomes exponentially multiplied, pushing away everything that gets in their path."

"_Why are you telling me this?_" Eli asked, obviously unamused.

"So you won't have any questions when this happens" Sam said. He raised the huge barrel, pointed it at the pivot of the right spinning gizmo, and fired. The metal was obliterated, slammed through its original place into the wall behind, and even through it. The bullets did push away everything, creating a nasty hole that drilled through to the core of the bedrock-layered wall that ran around the entire complex. Twenty feet of destruction. Sam then aimed and repeated toe process on the other spinning blade machine. There were no blades anymore. With no pivot to hold them they went flying into the ceiling and walls and went skidding and spinning across the floor. The electronic wires crackled violently, but as Sam pressed onward, they stopped. He even intimidated electricity with his gun...

"Now then" Sam said, "you said I won't kill you today? How are you so sure that any stray bullet I fire won't just burrow straight through your walls and blow you into nothingness from where I stand now?" A long, nerve-wrecking silence followed. Sam ignored it and walked on, keeping his gun out for intimidation purposes. Eli gave up on trying to stop him and only hoped that his arrogance would slow him down more than the traps.

* * *

_A short distance ahead_ Beelzebub warned _there is a pitfall. Stop walking now. _Yvonne kept in step with his instructions and waited just in front of the invisible pit covered by a dusty tarp. As she stood, her alien aid flew across the gap and used its dimensional properties to weight down a certain lever that activated the fall. A wide hole was opened before Yvonne, and she scoffed at it. She backed up a few steps to get a running start and sprinted at the hole. At the last second, she made a flying dive across. It was obvious that she couldn't make it, but Beelzebub helped her out by letting her grab onto his extended antennae and use it as a rope.

"Anything else?" Yvonne asked lethargically.

_There's a fork up ahead_ he communed. _I suggest we head to the right_.

"Very well" Yvonne sighed. She pulled herself the whole way up, waited for her little helper to mount her head again, and started off again. The fork came up at once. The left looked sterile and well-cleaned, a sure sign that cleaning was essential in keeping whatever horror working properly. The right was a contorted mess of writhed and gnarled body parts that long ago rotted into the fleshy disgust that covered the stone flooring.

"You would suggest that way, wouldn't you!?" Yvonne growled.

_It is the safer passage at the moment _Beelzebub argued calmly.

"What is that shit?" Yvonne said, pointing to the moss of rot on the ground.

_Decayed human remains_ Beelzebub explained. His inflection was such that made it seem like he had seen such hideous fungus before.

"That's exceedingly nasty!" Yvonne shouted. "I'm going to the left!"

_I suggest heavily against it_ Beelzebub insisted. He poked his legs into Yvonne's ice-blue hair and subsequently took control of her body.

"Wha-what the fuck!?" Yvonne screamed. Her body started marching to the right fork, stomping through the sticky, horrible growth underfoot. "Let me go! Damn you! LET GO OF ME!!!"

_In the interest of keeping us both alive_ he said, _I politely decline. I'll guide you through here, just trust me and don't resist control so much. It'll be over very soon. In the mean time, I'll dull your sense of smell so the stench doesn't get to you as much._

"Whatever" Yvonne huffed. "Just don't get too comfy up there, okay? I don't want you doing this to me anymore."

_I don't have to prod into your head to possess you _he told her.

"I don't want to know where else you can do this!" Yvonne shouted. She closed her eyes and let Beelzebub steer her through the next room. She could feel the stink pressing against her skin, making it hot with the grave smell of umpteen graves being blown open. After a few minutes, the trek was over. Yvonne could feel herself on solid ground and the control was slowly returning back to her own mind. She declined herself from taking a quick glance back at the room she had just navigated, as the horror would certainly overload her and force her to vomit, which would consume time and prevent her from winning.

"Let's keep moving!" Yvonne ordered. "Where to now?"

_There is only one room between you and your target_ Beelzebub told her. _That room will be quite difficult to navigate, but it is the best chance you have._

"Really?" Yvonne asked. "That's great! That's fucking great!" She looked around for a dim glimmer of what she assumed was a camera and shouted into it. "You hear that you old fuck!? I'm getting closer and closer! You won't get to live very much longer now! I hope you pray to some merciful gods because you'll need all the divine favors possible to get out of this! HAHAHAHAHA!!!"

_Your laugh is annoying_ Beelzebub said.

"You be quiet" Yvonne ordered. "I think I can do this next part by myself, thank you..." Beelzebub gave of a mental sigh of defeat and let his host walk haughtily onward into the next untellable horror in the mansion of madness.


	26. Double Dead End

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

"You ready?" Mort said.

"Oh yeah" Tom replied. The air was becoming thicker and thicker with the stink of building gasoline and the pilot light of the stove was beginning to build up. Now was there only time to move. To prevent their sudden death from the arrows, every metal and otherwise piercing resistant surface had been stripped away and patched hastily together to make body-sized shields. With Mort's huge body, most of the resources went his way. Tom would stick close enough so the arrows couldn't get between them as they would be sprinting at full speed across the dark-green lawn to the prop cave.

"On three then" Mort said.

"As in" Tom started, "run _on _three, or 1,2,3, then run?"

"On three" Mort said. Tom nodded and set himself in running position to stay in step with his friend. Their shields at the ready to block all the arrows that came their way, Mort and Tom took a step back.

"One" Mort started. Tom tensed up his feet and took in a deep breath. "Two..." Mort did the same as Tom behind him, relaxing his body and allowing the destined winds push at his back to drive him forward. "THREE!" Both men sprinted forth, step in step. Tom's flight had much longer, jumping steps as he ran to keep up with the mammoth Mort, but he did. No crack came from their traveling wall. They ducked down far enough so even their feet were covered as the arrows battered the shields.

_It's a four second run_ Tom said to himself _but it feels like a full mile sprint. It's all in the mind, that's all. I just need to concentrate on how short this yard is and...uh...wait, I've been talking way longer than four seconds. What the fuck!?_

Mort, meanwhile, trusted in his senses and continued hastily stomping across the lawn with not a thought in his head. Unfortunately, the winds of fate seemed to hate young Thomas. In this perfectly structured movie-set style backyard, the creator forgot nothing in even the most minor details. To that effect, that tall grass hid an assortment of tiny rocks that rolled from the aesthetically carved cave mouth, and one of those rocks was just big enough to trip the ninja-esque Tom. Tom caught the rock with his toes and stifled his scream into a whimper, but his perfect timing and sure steps were thrown all to hell as he started stumbling chaotically into Mort's backside.

"Tom!" Mort yelled. Then he too, for not paying his mind only to the guiding wind, tripped on a slippery rock. Instinctively, both boys tucked into their shields and flew the rest of the way. Only an inch of deathly arrow notches actually remained, but their senses refused to tell them that the danger was over and they tumbled with their shields up the whole time. The metal scraped and scratched them both, and when they hit the rocky ground they were hurt even further.

A few moments passed. The arrows had all hummed to a stop and the boys still laid in crumpled, painful piles on the ground.

"Stupid...fucking...world..." Tom groaned.

"Don't curse the world for you own shortcomings" Mort said.

"Is that a short joke, O'Neal?" Tom retorted.

"I met that man once" Mort said. "It took a lot of myself not to kill him..." Mort helped himself up to his feet then pulled up Tom after. They took another few seconds to brush themselves off and check their bodies for broken-ness. Nothing was majorly, debilitatingly done in, just hurt all over.

"Well, we're alive" Tom said.

"Maybe for now" Mort added, seeing all the arrows their shields had blocked and the punctured marks in the metal and lead-lined hides of their shields. "We can't assume that we'll stay safe for long. This madman may very well have built some inescapable traps for us to fall into."

"But...that's pointless" Tom said. Mort looked at him curiously and slipped on his black goggles. "No designer ever does anything impossible in a game. Every trap has to have some solution, or the player won't play anymore."

"But for us" Mort began, "not playing means death, and death beyond death."

"Even if he's the devil" Tom said confidently, pulling up his mask, "he wouldn't send us in to die and waste all the time it took to find us like that" with a snap of his finger. Mort began to understand his point. "Even if all but one of us can pull through, we were sent here because even just one of us can kill this dude and send him to pay his debt. That's what we do. We're Satan's Bounty Hunters." Tom started off into the cave without Mort following, but Mort eventually smiled and jogged on after him. The boys continued on with Mort's night-vision goggles guiding the way through the sharp cave to the next obstacle.

* * *

Yvonne's next challenge was a room. That was it, just a large, empty room. Her killer's instincts told her that something was wrong with the room and her paranoia prevented her from walking calmly through the room. Her twitchy, cockroach companion had gone dormant at her demanding request and simply sat atop her head and watched her dominantly stride through the empty box of a room. Meanwhile, Eli had taken a particular attention to the girl and her insect helper.

"Claustrophobia" he said to himself, flipping switches at his side. "Such a common fear in people today, and so easy to exploit. So long as there is darkness she can move through it, but if she can't move she will collapse. I'm sorry sweety, but I don't think you and I would get along if you came into my house. You'll have to stop where you are..." He pressed a button on the console labeled 'break'. Suddenly, the other monitors in his basement laboratory went dark. Only Yvonne's room could be seen, and the almost magical progress of the trap.

_I sense danger_ Beelzebub warned.

"Where?" Yvonne asked. "I don't sense anything. It's just a boring, white room with nothing in it. He must have run out of ideas when he was buil-" and she hit the wall. She stumbled back only a half step before hitting the other wall, then swayed to the side and hit that wall too. The entire room was now only an optical illusion barely the size of a small closet, with a painted door looking the same distance away as it always had.

The truth of the room was its main, understanding feature: sterile white everything. The room at no point was as large as she viewed it ,and only when she was physically confronted with the inability to move did her mind recognize that she was in a claustrophobic hell. To top the terror off, Eli turned off the single light that moved with the room's moving walls that kept within perfect step of her, and she broke down into hyperventilation and tears.

_I foresaw this happening_ Beelzebub said. Yvonne didn't listen. The alien found it harder to burrow into her mind anymore now that it had shut down and started swimming in a chaotic ocean of fear. He could still see how this malignancy had manifested within her as the killer's mind went stumbling back to the early days when all this untamed passion was formed.

She was only a girl, Beelzebub observed through his telepathic link, when this fear came about. Although it is common in most humans for obvious reasons, Yvonne was terrified of enclosed spaces when she opened the cupboard of her rustic poverty-built home and out rolled a severed head. That sparked the initial fear of small spaces and her callous exterior towards death and murder. Soon after that incident, her way of life improved as she was adopted to another, slightly better off family at the base of a mighty castle. Turns out the head that fell upon her was one of both of her parents.

In this new life she enjoyed more comforts and many more adopted siblings that the pity-spreading, pious family took under their wings so they could be 'better off' in the terrible world. Not soon after that she experienced a new type of zealous fear, that of the dark. It was a stormy night and the electric lamps that lit the home were starting to flicker off erratically. The parents turned off the electricity and lit the candles to keep track of the children.

"_Let's hold hands and pray"_ the mother said. The children gathered together among the candles and sat together in peace. Then, the wind blew open the windows and the candles were blown out. Young Yvonne held tight to her brother and sister, waiting desperately for the storm to pass by and the older ones to find their way to close the window and relight the candles. Over the gusting gale of the storm, horrible screams could be heard by her sharp, young ears. The deathly growls and groans of everyone she now knew as a family surrounded her, and the manic laughter of some demented man echoed in the spacious family room she was in. When it was over, a single light came under the chin of her father, grinning with wide, crazy eyes and a glimmering knife in hand.

Everyone else was dead and the hands she held were attached to nothing. What else had happened, Beelzebub could not decipher, as Yvonne's mind strayed too far into a mad rush of anxiety that her memories began to blur and rot in with her present fears and the fond memories of all the clothes she bought in her life.

_You are a fool_ Beelzebub said, mostly to himself. _You act like the world belongs to you, but you hardly belong in this world...you pitiful child. I shall help you out of my duty, but I cannot find myself to enjoy this partnership further..._ So the alien morphed back and enacted his own plans to aid his partner out of her comatose state of fear and get her on with ending another's life.

* * *

"And now you" Eli said, now turning to Samuel's screen, "Mr. Business. My fifth wife was a great business woman, but it cost us our marriage. Since then I could never find it in myself to respect a person who wears a suit like you wherever they go. I'm sorry, it's just a personal conviction of mine. I'm sure I run a great business yourself, I just don't care for your own way of life. I don't care to have you visit me either..." So he pressed a button.

Sam walked down a narrow path way of blood-rusted metal siding. He kept alert as he humanly could and let his gun stay in steady hand the whole time, lest some monster pop up and kill him in such a closed corridor. There was a careful and meticulous clicking from within the walls that became very sharp and concise, as if he was being targeted from the other side. Sam sprang into action and rolled forward, dodging the thrust of many angled blades from the slots in the bloody walls. Suddenly he could see all the thin, razor-cut slots through which the blades could travel to kill him. He was, in a sense of the term, dead walking.

"Shit" Sam cursed. Without wasting a moment he kept in pace with the terrible clicking and dodged the swords as athletically as he could. There was no limit to the number or particular range of the weapons that came at him, so he had to stay ahead of the coming blades. Even his speed proved itself useless as the blades came up far infront of him, forming a cutting wall that would cage him in for his death. He shot it with his Earth-rending gun, and the thunderous blast resonated endlessly inside the drastically small hall, causing his brain a great deal of overstimulated pain that slowed him down to nearly a crawl. He made it to the ruined wreckage he had just made, but so did the other blades.

A group of them came up from behind and forced him past the shattered wall, then more came up from the side and forced his arms to move up and away from any more of the blades that were drawn at him. His gun was now pointed at his hip. He could only take a step before a blade was drawn up dangerously between his legs at his groin. Another at his throat forced his head back, a poking at his back forced his hips forward; the threats from all sides bombarded his killer instincts with danger until, at last, he was still. The rest of the blades clicked off and withdrew, leaving the clustered group around the evil man which, if he budged even a centimeter, would rend him apart into ribbons.

"...fuck..." Sam again cursed. The rest of the game, unknown to him, was up to the underdogs Mort and Tom. This was indeed a trap with no escape, all of which were bordered around Eli's immediate vicinity.

"This just leaves the Negro" Eli said, "and the child...I would like either one to give me a visit, but we shall see who gets to my welcome mat first..."


	27. The Grim Young Reaper

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Tom and Mort were the sole focus of Eli's jaded gaze. They were the only two who still had the chance of getting to the room to kill him. Right now, they were exiting the dark cave and stumbling fearfully into a sort of cathedral room.

"What the fuck!?" Tom shouted, bending over to pant and catch his breath. "How did that happen!?"

"Who knows" Mort said. "I believe it's best if we just forget about it and keep moving. Now then...where are we?"

"Nowhere good" Tom said. The Gothic architecture of the blood-orange stones and stained-glass windows of formless webbings was the initial turn off. The high ceiling and arching columns of stone that cast shadows across the floor was the first real alarm.

"Those shadows are far to suspicious" Mort said. He pulled down his goggles and peered through them, ignoring the glare from the light that shined through the windows. Through his night vision, he saw nothing out of the ordinary, and he looked hard.

"I'm not seeing anything" Tom said. "Let's just stay in the light if the shadows are trapped."

"The light may be trapped" Mort said. "This man is a diabolical soul. His specialty is to trick us into a false sense of security, then lead us into death. He is a pied piper of mechanical constructs."

"Every game is different" Tom eloquently summarized. Eli heard their conversation and, with the flip of a switch, showed them just how different this new game of his was. The windows blasted open and out of each one came a rotting corpse that whirred mechanically and roared viciously.

"Robots?" Mort asked. The bodies started shambling toward the two boys, hands out and clenching. They had the definite look of death on them, but despite that they moved.

"No!" Tom concluded instantly, his inner gaming idiot taking control, "Zombies!"

"Are you serious!?" Mort yelled, choosing to believe his uneducated friend in the heat of the moment. Tom pulled out his Uzi and started spraying bullets all around. Mort decided to use his bare hands and rend apart the mechanical nightmares, rather wanting to save his shovel on more holy prey. "Let's get out of here!"

"Right!" Tom yelled. They both regrouped and fought of the coming undead as they could, making their way towards the door. As they left the room, Mort noticed that the fleshed out heads of the zombies had shimmering mechanics and robotics inside them. Once in the next room finding doors and a metal sliding bolt, they closed and locked the door.

"That was fucked up" Tom pointed out.

"I don't think they were zombies..." Mort started. Tom looked at him judgmentally and silently edged him to go on. "Didn't you see the metal inside them? I think they're less supernatural and more...mechanical."

"Really?" Tom sarcastically snorted.

"Trust me" Mort said. "I can assume the notions of a living thing based on their breathing. Zombies, to my knowledge, do breath, and those did not. What little air came from them happened to come from their weights.

"Ah" Tom said, noting that he totally believed Mort's baseless explanation. "Well, can you feel any metal wind in here?"

"...ah" Mort started. Suddenly, the crashing of even more windows in the stark and stoically built Gothic columns and arches built out of cave walls. More rotting corpses painted in beautiful colors with the whirring joints of harsh metal started lurching forward to Tom and Mort. They decided that enough was enough and they unsheathed their weapons to battle the hideous fiends off.

* * *

"I think" Eli started, unsure of his own thoughts, "that I may have seen that young man before..." Unknown to him, as all his monitors were focused on the boys still active, Beelzebub had broken the walls of the illusion room and was carrying Yvonne through the walls of the heinous mansion.

_It's all so well planned_ he told himself as he strode along. Yvonne was carelessly tucked under his lanky, bone-thick arm and held up by his clawed hands. Her mind was still a swimming chaotic mess, but the torrent had died down and her memories had stopped from what he saw. _All the traps can be seen and managed from within the walls. I had my suspicions of how an old man could control such seemingly uncontrollable traps and snares in the thick of the danger._

All the intricate blades and moving walls and floors and ceiling fans were in plain sight from the supposed one-way windows in the wall. Electric consoles labeled and wired through the wall into the machines were plainly labeled and beeping with bright green lights. Beelzebub took in everything from within the walls, squeezing his way through the slim walls and holding Yvonne overhead or dragging her along by his feet wherever she could fit, continuing to make his way in the direction of the old manipulator. He also noticed that, on the walls and other places where the cameras would be planted in the trap rooms, there was no monitoring equipment.

_Hubris or oversight?_ Beelzebub questioned. _The fact that he only trusts that his victims will play by his rules is a foolish thing to assume. I have seen that the people all over the galaxy always find a way to cheat their way out of danger or other situations. These killers, Yvonne excluded, must be that same way. I'm sure the glasses man will end up winning, with the young fearless flirt and the large black man just slightly behind._

His assumptions were far off, however, as Sam was continuing to draw upon his extra energy reserves to prevent his arms from moving into the blades all around him. He had seriously considered blasting apart his hips and legs to escape, but the fruitlessness of his plot meant he just had to continue and concentrate on how to keep the feeling circulating through his body.

Meanwhile, Tom and Mort continued to fight a seemingly never ending stream of dead bodies and bizarre mannequins with hydraulic mechanics.

"This is getting stupid" Tom shouted.

"True" Mort agreed. "Let's just proceed through the door."

"There's a lot of them there" Tom noted, taking the horde of static bodies into account. "If we get to close they'll overwhelm us."

"Not if we move together" Mort figured. By know the constant hacking and bludgeoning was just getting tedious, and the wretched stink had coated the walls up and down. What was once a smoldering sourness of a freshly opened grave of liquid rot was now a bothersome stink, like a cat was living there and no one realized it. The boys decided to make a short break for the door, walking apathetically towards the carefully carved, oddly weathered door with weapons drawn.

"Get some cover" Tom said. Mort glanced at him, noticed his hand retrieve a grenade from his pocket, and broke off for one of the nearby columns.

"You sure that's a good idea?" Mort asked. "This cave may not be structurally sound."

"Well" Tom started, dashing to the side and pulling the pin, "it ain't a great idea, bu it'll work..." With a toss and a bound, the grenade landed at the center of the zombie horde. Eli saw the small object bounce into the midst of his remote-control zombies, but just sat back ind response and flipped a few more switches. The a shaking force, the grenade exploded and the rotted parts of slime-coated metal went sheering through the air as shrapnel. Tom was fine, his slender body hidden behind the sound, rock column, but Mort could feel the burning run of blood down his new, neat arm cuts.

"Shit" Mort cursed. Above all this chaos, in the clearing smoke and ashen smolder, a loud and gravely rumbling was heard at the door. A huge stone seal was slowly sliding down from a compartment above the arch. Tom and Mort noticed it, then regarded each other. With his wounds, Mort thought he would be in no condition to survive whatever perils awaited ahead, and Tom assumed the same thing.

"I'll go!" Tom shouted.

"You go!" Mort shouted at the same time.

"Good plan" they harmonized. So Tom started sprinting, noticing just how fast the door was actually sliding and made a desperate dive. He slid under the door just in time for the stone construct to close, and found himself in a sort of stagnant air with no light at all.

"Thomas!" Mort yelled in vain at the thick rock. "Press onward! I will wait here for you to come back! And if you can, do something about these zombies!" With his piece said, Mort turned back to the still coming hordes of disgusting, broken bodies with weapons amateurishly attached to the arms and legs and were left protruding through other parts of their bodies. Mort held up his shovel like and ax, rested it on his shoulder, and grinned. "...the wind stops here, anyway. Your path lies ahead, and mine stays torrential in this room..." With no real care for his prose, the zombies leaped and rushed the guarding man!

* * *

"Hello!?" Tom shouted. In the darkness, his eyes adjusted and he found himself in a very plain hallway with feint markings on the wall. There were two walls that stretched towards a dead end, a flat floor, and a short incline that led to the door he just came from. His guard was on full alert, and even his sword was out as a precaution, lest a zombie come up from the ground.

"Are you in here, old guy?" Tom shouted again. No response but utter blackness. Suddenly, the crackle of electricity. The ceiling of fluorescent lights started to dimly come on at once. The change was slow enough that Tom could still see after they were all on, and oh what he saw! The markings on the wall were pictures, hieroglyphs of a sort that told a progressing story from the ramp to the faraway wooden door. There were not windows or apparent trap doors, just the walls in the hall.

"Hello, son" Eli said through a weak intercom near the door. "Can you take a look at these walls, please?"

"Uh...no" Tom said. "I'm not here to learn anything, just to kill you."

"Well" Eli said sullenly, "it's quite a story for me to tell you. Would you like it narrated?"

"What's the story about?" Tom asked. "Can you just get to the point? Is it some cheesy origin on why you're such a damn maniac, where all this came from, why I have to kill you?"

"I was a young man" Eli started in an attempt to hold his killer's interest. "I...wasn't very good with love. Any girl I liked was already with another fellow. It was hard on my heart. One day, I asked out the most lovely girl in town, Esther Gail, and she said yes. I was so happy that I couldn't believe it. Then, when I returned home for dinner that night, I noticed an odd gentleman, a Mafia looking guy or at best a salesmen, that joined us for dinner. He looked alright, but his eyes had a horrible light about him, like a demons..."

"So" Tom started, venturing an assumption, "this guy inadvertently gave you great luck with love as long as you would pay it back in Hell?"

"Quite so" Eli said, sounding happy, "only it was my parents who had given me my debt. The effect was instant. As a minor, I couldn't sign my own contract, even for my soul. My parents said they just wanted me to be happy, and for quite a time I was. Everyone loved me, not just the girls. I hung onto Esther until she disappeared and her best friend, Holly consoled me. I later found out, after marrying Holly, that she was riotously jealous of Esther and killed her to win me over."

"Ouch" Tom remarked, heading forward to the door.

"I was so upset that I killed Holly for what she did" Eli said without remorse. "Still, until I was scheduled to die, I had to live life with unconditional love from everyone I ever met. I got whatever I wanted handed to me, and it made me a miserable person. I found that without working for all the great things I received, I would never really be happy, and so my final act twelve years ago was to commission this labyrinth to be built around what used to be my home...and I killed anyone who ever set foot within out of rage."

"Rage, eh?" Tom said, opening the door. "You seem like pretty calm old dude to me."

"Oh, that I am, young fellow" he said. "All the killing over the years has dulled me down to the sense of depression. I'm not a very sullen guy most of the time...just lonely."

"Well," Tom began, making his way through the remains of the house Eli was in as he searched, "if you kill all your guests, you're likely to be lonely."

"...I won't be lonely for long" Eli said. "Once you meet me, you'll kill me immediately, right?"

"Yup" Tom said. "Now, where the hell are you?"

"The basement" Eli called, this time with no intercom. "Please, come down and visit a moment." Tom pulled out his Uzi, made sure there were bullets, and carefully walked downstairs. The basement was small but lavishly painted with the perfectly preserved, nude bodies of at least a dozen women. "My wives" the old man's voice pointed out. "Part of my curse is that even the beauty of love will never leave me, and my wives will stay beautiful forever. I couldn't let them stay in the ground or be burnt to ashes, you see, because it couldn't happen." Tom looked at the mural, a careful and milky flowing of white and red landscape. Each woman was painted like a sort of cloud and was nailed to the wall by their hands an feet in differing, somewhat disturbing, positions.

"This is not a healthy hobby" Tom said, pointing his gun at Eli's face. Eli took his whithered old hand and moved the gun away.

"If I may" he pleaded as an old man does plead, "could you do me a favor in killing me?"

"...your heart?" Tom assumed.

"No, no" Eli corrected. He reached into a drawer at the base of his mighty console, giving Tom the time to watch the zombies continue to push on Mort in that room. He handled them efficiently and stylishly, letting his huge coat billow with his blows like a cape. "This gun belonged to my dear friend who went to war" Eli explained, handing an old-fashioned German Luger to Tom. "If anything, I wish for you to kill me with it...as my last apology for stealing his wife and family."

"Wow" Tom said, sheathing his gun and checking out the antique. "You know, as weird as this sounds...you deserve a good, quick release."

"Thank you" Eli said. "Tell me, have you ever heard of a man who calls himself 'Jormungandr'?"

"What?" Tom asked, twisting his face for maximum curious effect.

"Oh, you look exactly like him, only without the beard" Eli said. "I wondered if you were his brother or cousin...or son is all."

"I'm an only child" Tom said "and my most resembling cousin died last year. I don't know who you're talking about."

"Ah, well then" Eli said with finality and a smile, "let's be off, then." Without a second word, Tom shot the gun, killing Eli instantly. As he died, so did his brides, each of their bodies dissolving into nothing. Tom looked back at the wall and saw how the milky read and white streaks came together to form a hideous message.

_'You will die, Quindale'_ it read, with a signature hidden by the ashen leg of what used to be a woman,  
-_Jormungandr_

Toms stood in shock at the horrid message, ignoring the obvious task of releasing his competitors and friends. In time, the secret of this threatening persona would be revealed to the killers, but now it is time to rest...


	28. The Cosmic Conspiracy

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

At one fated gas station in the middle of nowhere, the god of gore walked through the doors. The redneck clerk leaned onto the counter with his squinted eyes and paid the customer no mind.

"You take credit?" asked the stranger.

"Yup" replied the clerk. With a nod, the man kept walking, searching through the aisles. He searched through each rack of old and expired candies and various other oddities found only on the sticks like this with a goal. Still searching, he became irked that his goal was not in sight.

"Shit" he cursed in a whisper. "There aren't any Gummi Heads (gummi candies shaped like voodoo heads). There's plenty of old shit, but nothing gummi. I need my gummis!" With a sigh, the man admitted brief defeat. As he passed the freezer aisle of ancient and otherwise rotted foods, he saw a bottle of proverbial heaven. Marked at the aged price of 70 cents, a glass bottle of Cherry Fizzy with snow-like frost at the bottom. So he took it, floated to the counter, and slammed it in front of the clerk's face.

"That it?" he asked.

"Yup" the customer said. Without looking, the trucker man ringed it up and uttered the price.

"77 cents" he grumbled. The paying man put down three quarters and two pennies, then sped happily on his way.

"Nice day" he called as he left, shutting the door behind him.

"Yup" the old man croaked.

"Hee!" Johnny squealed, his frosty drink in hand. "This must be good luck! Finding holy water in a swampy desert, I'm a lucky bastard!"

"Don't do it, Johnny" the French voice warned. This time her dress was cut from the crotch to the brim, but her back was turned and the exposed area didn't show. Her hair was down, adorned with bows and black roses that stood out in her ashen-gray hair. She held a fan that blew the trail of smoke she breathed into a fog of twisting faces and agonizing visions. "Drinking during your exile is a sin! Your feet will fall off!"

"Eh?" Johnny grunted. "I'm not diabetic...yet. If I want an ancient cherry Fizz, I'm getting it!"

"Well, how hypocritical" she said, skittering closer without turning. "If you truly wanted it for yourself, why did you pay for it? Why is that store clerk still alive?"

"Why shouldn't he be?" Johnny asked. "He didn't try to stop me or slow me down. He was just minding himself and letting me do as I please. He was trusting me to act civil towards him, so why shouldn't I?"

"So you'll do only what people expect of you?" she asked.

"No" Johnny retaliated. "I'll do what good people should do to other good people. I won't conform if others push themselves on me, and I'll kill anyone who refuses to accept me for all my faults and chastises me for them. Men who mind themselves, like him, are the only good people in the world. I could have walked in there in a bloody jumpsuit and hockey mask, but as long as I paid on my way out he would've smiled as I did." With an angry twist, he uncorked his soda and started drinking it. Perfectly preserved and fruity in the extreme. His imaginary cohort smirked and pulled out her cigarette. When Johnny was far enough away, she threw it to the gas pumps and watched the sparks build.

The poor old man inside saw the fire, got up lazily, and locked up shop before the explosion consumed him.

"FUCK!" Johnny shouted in shock. He spun around, keeping his drink at his side, and watched the building fireball.

"Misfortune loves you, Johnny" she said, cockily passing him. "It clings to you like the scene of pot on a college drop-out. You can't avoid utterly disappointing yourself at every turn. There is no peace for you in this world or any other. There is only doom and gloom..." So Johnny just stood there, watching the shrapnel fly past him. It never nicked him, although his bottle got shattered by a passing chunk of metal. It was like a vortex in reverse, with Johnny at the untouchable center.

"...so the good people die" Johnny lamented, "for the wrong reasons." His figmentary companion turned to him with her high and mighty smile to watch him sulk on his coat. "...I should take a walk..."

"A walk through where, Johnny?" she asked. Johnny whipped out a revolver from deep within his coat, put it next to his head and turned with a grin.

"The Cosmos!" A shot was fired. The French devil grinned. Johnny was gone...physically gone!

* * *

"I'm going for a walk" Devi called. Of course Tenna didn't hear her. Her sex comas usually drowned out enough that she wouldn't hear a nuclear explosion go off. Devi left anyway, wrapping scarf around her neck as the weather called for dry, chilly winds that would chap and crack her fragile skin. She pulled out a cigarette before hitting the street and was smoking as she walked away from the apartment.

The winds were indeed there, although more moist and chilling than dry and plain unpleasant. Still, the scarf stayed as a testament to her own worry. She didn't realize how neurotic she looked with the scarf until the first half-mile when she decided to take it down and keep it lazily draped around her back.

_Nothing makes sense anymore_ Devi dreadfully mused. _The dreams and the paintings...all coming up at the same time as someone else. Who else is making these paintings? Who am I sharing these visions with? Does this have something to do with Clara disappearing...? No way, that's way to weird to be true. Something freaky is happening...something just plain fucked up. I need to get my mind off this weirdness for at least a day or my head's gonna explode..._

As Devi sulked over the overpass of the abandoned train yard, a man came happily humming along. There was a skip in his step and a bright carrying tune in his whistle. Devi's melancholy was too thick for his pleasantness to penetrate, but he ignored her and continued to move on his own merry way, right down the middle of the road.

"Oh" he began in sing-song virtuoso, "what a beautiful mooor-niiing! Oh what a beautiful niiight! Oh what a beautiful..." and his voice was gone. The wind stopped for a second, the clouds changed places instantly in the sky, and the stars were rearranged for about a split second behind the deep blue horizon.

"It's not a beautiful life after all, is it?" asked a voice to Devi. She slowly turned to face the face that made the voice, but she only saw a hand. That hand pushed her off the overpass and she went falling. There was nothing but the cackling madness of absolute black overhead. No forms anymore in the shapeless sky. Even when the ground should have killed her, she passed through only darkness, and that's when the madness clutched hard at her throat.

"Devi, Devi" a choir of childish songs sang, "the one that got away! She went to live her life but just can't stand another day!" Devi's mouth gaped in fear and her body went limp as the air from nowhere went blazing past her. The childish voices started laughing in hideous distortion and soon started another terrible verse.

"Devi, Devi, painting in her room! She never ever leaves to find a man to fill her womb!"

"Hey, wait a second!" Devi began harshly protesting. "I've had sex! I just don't want to have a kid if I'm not married!" Now suddenly upset over the judgmental demon fourth graders who sang from the impenetrable shadows, she pouted and let the disgusting voices giggle at her.

"Life for the innocent" a new, familiar man's voice started from a distance, "is short. The innocent are always cut down first so the corrupt can take their place."

"Now what?" Devi groaned. "Some bull-shitty new age poet form hell?"

"I never thought of myself as a poet" he responded. "No one's ever thought anything I've done was ever very poetic. I'm sure if you look hard enough, some strange poetic themes can be dug up in what I do, but it's not something I'd pride myself in admitting."

"Why not?" Devi asked, now uncaring that she plummeted infinitely to what she thought would be death. "Poets are hard to come by today."

"What about Goths?" he asked.

"Well, _good_ poets" Devi responded. The man's voice gave a warm, almost humane kind of laughter. "So, uh, what's going on right now?"

"Just taking a walk" he said.

"Where?" she asked. "I don't see any roads." Suddenly, the darkness lifted. Devi's stomach did a fatal back flip and she nearly vomited. Whether from the sheer magnitude of what she saw or the shock of her body realizing there was no gravity in deep space she couldn't tell. The shaky, shadowed silhouette paced with hands in pocket across an invisible strand of walkway in the middle of the starry black. His hair was all in a disorganized mess. His coat hid a zombified logo on his bloodied shirt. His face was like the undead itself, what was once lifeless now brimming with a mystical energy that reflected life around it.

"Of course not" Nny said with blind eyes. "You can't build roads in space." Devi's brain turned off. She felt her body get lifted up and thrown with cosmic speed back down to earth.

* * *

And so she returned. The pupils of Devi's eyes, for those who would see them as she leered terrified over the overpass, were sharply refigured into psychedelic shapes. The black of her seeing eye stood out from the twirling colors indescribable as what looked like question marks.

"Those roads don't really exist" Nny said as he walked away, taking the place of the man that he walked into from the cosmos. "I'm not sure why, but they've been there for me to walk on for as long as I've been walking...have a nice day..."

Devi stayed stunned in a cosmic coma until nightfall. She came out of her trance panting, nearly hyperventilating, when an earnest couple passed her by.

"Oh my" the guy said, rushing to her side. "Are you alright, young lady?" Devi fell forward into the guy's shoulder. She felt desperately at her face to make sure it was there, and her scarf to find it coiled neatly around her neck. She felt like screaming, but her heart beat the air into her throat.

"What happened?" the girl asked.

"I'm not sure" her guy said. "Hey, are you okay? Are you alone? Talk to me?"

"...cosmos..." was Devi's first word. She shook her head and came back to the present with a start. "Ah! Where am I? What time is it!? Did I leave my oven on???"

"Oh no!" the girl shouted. "She's an amnesiac!"

"Let us take you to the hospital!" The guy politely demanded. Devi looked between them, the childish verses stuck in her brain. Could she take her life? Did a child really matter to her...where had she gone...?

"Yeah" she finally said. "I need...a hospital...and morphine...right now..." And so she was carried and carted to the closest facility that would allow her to sleep an opiate induced sleep for the night.

* * *

The spark of intellect shot off somewhere in the alleys of the city. Among the drunkard and drinking hobos sat a short, middle-school looking figure. Around him were the tarnished, cracked skulls of elder men with distinctly square looking finger marks at the temples.

"Welcome back" he said as he stood. His hat drooped over his face til he brushed it back up. His clever nightmare-clown design shined in the pale light of the moon and the empty reflecting bottles of liquor around him. "Hmph. Maybe I should throw a party? Some kind of 'welcome back' affair? It might not be a good party, though. I can't think of anyone to invite." In a limitlessly evil low, the tiny figure laughed with clenched teeth. His white eyes and painted face rang echoes around the foreign walls around him in terrible ways. "First though, 'He'll' have to know. It's my job now, that is..."

The word 'Fuck' stood out particularly upon his chest. There was no fashion behind his selective word, as the hand of someone much crazier chose it out of spite long, long ago.


	29. lessthanthree LennaxSquee!

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Todd has found that school is still unbearable in certain areas, but his brother's extended wing of protection helped him coast through painlessly. Lenna was still a constant nuisance to Pepito, but the feminine attention was more positively received to Todd. He liked having a girl close to him, even if she was a vampire. The normal kids all feared him, and the outcasts liked him at a far, far distance. No one but Pepito and Lenna got close to Squee in school.

"Hey" Pepito began at the private lunch table.

"What?" Todd replied.

"How's that what's-his-face guy you've been playing with?" Pepito asked.

"RoninMusashi12?" Todd clarified. "I guess he's fine. We've been ranking up like crazy lately."

"What game?" Pepito asked.

"Any game we play" Todd answered. "He's like a gaming genius, or something."

"Isn't that oxymoronic?" Lena pointed out, stirring her food with a fork. "A 'Gamer Genius'? Anyone who plays games is obviously not a genius."

"Hey now!" Pepito growled. "My IQ is over a hundred and I play games regularly! Squee pays them too!"

"The exception makes the rule" Lena said, moving one seat closer to Todd. "Squee's a handsome, smart young man who happens to play video games. They don't effect him in any way..."

"Oh really?" Pepito began. "You haven't seen him play. He gets these wide, blank eyes like a fucking serial killer staring down his victim. It's scary!"

"So?" Lena said, wrapping her lace-covered arms around the unmoved Todd. "That doesn't change his appearance in any way..."

"So I'm just a piece of meat to you?" Todd joked. He chuckled lightly and Lena laughed, but Pepito just grumbled and turned away from their mushy affection. When he turned, he saw something outside the window. Far across the street from the school, in the busy urban streets, a transaction seemed to be going on. Normally, such incidental happenings wouldn't faze Pepito's satanic focus, but what happened now had somehow snared him.

Two men were standing on the street in classic trench-coats the middle of the day. Their conversation was obviously suspicious, but no one around them noticed. One man was about average height, and the other was shorter and very oddly built. It looked like he had a humped back or back-of-neck somehow.

The short man did most of the talking with the plain man nodding occasionally. Then, the short man slipped an envelope out and the normal man took it. He opened it, read it quickly, and put it back into his own coat. After that the conversation seemed to be over. The two walked away from each other and eventually disappeared from sight.

"Peppy?" Lena asked. "You okay?"

_Those people_ Pepito thought. _There was definitely some weird vibe coming from them. It felt...threatening. I'm a damn devil god and I felt like I was corner as I watched them. The presence that small one had was totally unearthly, and the taller one just plain scared me. I felt challenged...helpless just looking in his direction!_

"Pepito?" Todd asked. Pepito finally snapped out of it and grinned his devilish grin at his friends.

"Sorry" he said. "I was just planning an extortion scheme...got a little carried away is all."

"Oh" Todd said. "On whom?" Pepito sighed with a smile, glad the subject was averted but still on edge over the odd happening outside the window. His act held up perfectly, and even his own brother had no inkling that something was wrong.

* * *

"So what really happened at lunch today?" Todd asked that evening. Pepito froze up and accidentally ran into a fire, dying instantly from the game's poor design.

"Cheap-ass SHIT fire cock-smoker bitches!" Pepito raged. He felt the temptation to throw his controller into the TV, but resisted it and calmly set it down. Then he punched a hole in his bedroom wall. "What do you mean?" he now asked his brother.

"I know you weren't scheming" Todd explained, neck-deep into the game they played. "You're scheming face looks a lot scarier. Pepito retrieved his fist and sat back down. "You grin from ear to ear and your eyes roll back into your head."

"Like this?" Pepito asked, demonstrating his hellish clown smile and white eyes. Todd chuckled at his brother's antics and nodded.

"You seemed really distant and sort of angry" Todd pointed out. "I've never seen you like that. It was like you were calm, but also ready to kill."

"You're always like that, killer" Pepito said, mocking his sibling. "I just had a bad premonition, is all. It's really nothing."

"Oh, alright" Todd said. He knew that the demon realm and its problems were no place for him to understand. "You know, I was thinking about asking Lena out sometime..." This sudden news furrowed Pepito's brow and shaded his eyes in black. "You think that's a bad idea? Since we're all friends, and it might get awkward around each other."

"Maybe" Pepito said. "It doesn't bother you that she's a little older and taller than you?"

"No" Todd said. "In fact, I never really paid attention to stuff like that. She's a nice girl, is all. I can see her without all that make-up acting like a normal girl sometime."

"That make-up keeps her alive, you know" Pepito pointed out. "It's super sun-proof. Besides, _hermano_, you shouldn't worry so much about love. I have a feeling most things we strive for will become useless in the near future."

"Really?" Todd asked. "Is this about your premonition?"

"Sort of..." Pepito answered. "As for Lena, do whatever you want, really. I don't care either way. But if she starts biting you, I'll kill her."

"Gotcha" Todd affirmed. They went right back to playing their game, unaware of the repercussions of Pepito's true premonition. In the game, a message flashed onto the screen, signaling that RoninMusashi12 had logged on. A few moments later, he sent an invite for Todd and his brother to join him in their game.

"You want to?" Pepito asked.

"Sure" Todd answered, accepting the virtual invite. They equipped their headphones and prepared to talk.

"Yo!" RM12 said to them both. "How're you guys doing?"

"We're okay" Todd answered. Pepito remembered that his headphones hadn't worked since his last raging torrent he threw last night, so he tossed them aside and scowled as the lobby screen came up.

"That's cool" RM12 replied. "Well, I'm ready for some homicide, how bout you?"

"Always" Todd said, half joking. The three started playing, killing enemy players left and right as soon as the map started up, thoroughly enjoying the massacre they all created along the way.

* * *

Meanwhile, as the sun had already set, Yvonne was settling in to bed. Her hair was reset to a regular, partially curly brown color and bunned up to keep it under control during the night. She wore a tiny negligee and black lace underwear to bed, as she is wont to do, and her handsome guards all retired to their tiny quarters upstairs and next to the door. Only Beelzebub stayed awake with Yvonne in his telepathic insect form.

"What an awful day" Yvonne growled. She huffed her way haughtily to bed and pouted on its edge. "I wake up and find out how badly I was embarrassed from you, and I lost the kill to Thomas of all people! God, this sucks!"

_At least you're alive_ Beelzebub pointed out.

"That doesn't matter to me" she grumped. "I just want to win this silly, stupid competition."

_Why?_ Beelzebub asked. _Does it have something to do with your past? Some deep-rooted complex that forces you to the top of whatever mountain you see?_ Yvonne, contrary to his plotted reaction, just scoffed at him and turned her head.

"Don't be an imbecile" she said. "I have no past." Beelzebub morphed into his alien form and quietly paced over to her.

_Of course you do_ it said, carrying the tone of concern more than matter-of-fact. _Don't you remember it?_

"Actually" Yvonne started "I don't. I don't even remember my parents. All I know is that I'm the daughter of royalty in my home country and when my parents died they gave me everything, down to even the villagers below their castle. I was born into this world with everything I would ever desire, and that's fine enough with me." Beelzebub kept silent for a while.

_How interesting_ it noted. _I've visited the surface of a dead, burned-out star and I've traveled into the event horizon of a black hole, but the living things that exist in this cosmos always find ways of surpassing my own understanding. You're condition is truly fascinating._

"Well, I am fascinating" Yvonne gloated. "I'm glad you could find me out of everything else in the universe. It's a good opportunity for you to study a superior specimen on this planet."

_Hmm_ Beelzebub apathetically grunted. It began to silently wonder if there truly was another purpose for it to be on this planet, something epic it had to observe. This game Yvonne played for the devil was one thing, but Beelzebub could already sense something infinitely more important, more cosmically significant happening right under his antennae.

_By the way_ it started up again politely, _when will you schedule a meeting with me and the provider of this event you're in? This Satan?_

"Oh, eventually" Yvonne responded. Honestly, she was unaware of how should could do that or if she would be allowed. She decided to tuck herself into her bed and wait for the next opportunity to ask. That was the best she could do for her handy psychic sidekick.


	30. Lessons in Life: the Slut

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

"Hello Yvonne" the voice mail cheered in a very valley-girl toned voice. "This is your hellion rep, the Succubus. I just want you to know that there aren't any challenges set up for you until next week, so just chill out, 'kay? Also, you're castle is out of food, so I've started stealing from the villagers. Bye-zeez!" Then message beeped off, leaving Yvonne to smolder over some random, hellish slut using her castle this whole time.

_She sounded nice enough_ Beelzebub pointed out from atop Yvonne's head.

"How dare she..." Yvonne growled. "FUCK IT! I'm carpet bombing the whole damn country-side!"

_Don't jump to conclusions_ Beelzebub said. _Just remain calm and take your mind off of vengeance. Save your emotions for the playing field where you can use them to your advantage. _

"Whatever" Yvonne growled. She stubbornly complied and went back to sit down. Elsewhere, in her homeland, the busty succubus was enjoying the life of luxury she so rightfully stole from the Eastern Europe princess. The villagers were more than happy to comply with her demands and become her new servants. Even the brutal criminals in the country loved her for her magical beauty, and not at all for the fact that she regularly killed someone out of boredom. At least she was prettier than the last on.

"More ham, my gorgeous lady?" and elderly man offered.

"More tea, beauteous one?" an old woman offered.

"How can we please you, our queen" all the teenage boys dutifully asked. She put a finger to her succulent lip and tapped it.

"I think I have a good idea" she teased. She pointed forward with her acrylic finger nail and started moving her hand back and forth among the line of gathered young and virile men. She half closed her eyes and started leaning in more, thinking hard about which one to choose to relieve her...boredom. Meanwhile, in the darker parts of the castle, the three hench-demons stirred about with anger for their master.

"This sucks" the jock said with her newly shaved square-jaw. "We can't even get up to the ground floor without getting bogged down with stupid chores, let alone stage a coup."

"We can't give up hope" the nerdy, freckled and bespectacled one said. "She knows we hate her and want to kill her, but we're succubi too. We just have to use our respective powers to get the villagers on our side!"

"Then we're screwed" the slightly thinner, still angry goth chick said. "What are a bunch of back-country hicks going to want with a nerd, a girl who looks like a man and...a cutter?"

"Scars can be sexy" the jock pointed out.

"We just have to try" the nerd again said. "We can't let her win! Our powers are ours, not hers! And once she's dead and eaten, we can really screw around with that other girl."

"But we can't" the jock pointed out. "Satan himself said that any demon caught messing with those 'Plug' nominees will get tortured in unspeakable and unimaginable ways."

"We won't be screwing with her" the nerd began...

"...because we'll be her advisors" the goth finished. "That's right! If we eat that slut we'll our powers and her rank!"

"Well then" the jock began again, caving in to their reasoning, "now we just have to find dudes messed up enough to get in bed with us..."

* * *

Speaking of beds, the Succubus queen had made her pick of a sixteen year old male, rippling with muscles and a head of gorgeous hair. She was actually captivated with him on a level beyond that of a lioness being captivated by a zebra carcass. They were in the most lavish and large bedroom, and she was preparing herself for a feast. He was commanded to sit on the bed and wait for her while she tried on all the clothes Yvonne had.

"Damn that tiny bitch!" she complained. "Her chest is too small. I can't fit into anything! I guess I'll have to wear this negligee. I hope he doesn't faint."

"Finally" the young man prosed. "Finally, after the days of waiting, I can finally become a true man! Even though I have a wife who is carrying my child and I love her greatly, this woman is the greatest beauty in the world to me. I swore to my manhood that I would get to see what that kind of beauty looked like naked, and now I'll get too! JOY!"

"Hey boy" she said teasingly. "You ready for the goddess?" The boy turned, very slowly, with flaring nostrils at the closet door. Although the veil that covered her wasn't invisible enough to really see through, her shadows spoke volumes. Her breasts were each bigger than the boys head, and her hips swayed out as she walked like a pendulum. "She's ready for you..."

"...mmmnnnn..." the boy groaned. The power of the demonic succubus had long ago rendered him a slave to her flesh's whim, and now his body was hers for the devouring. Literally. She climbed up onto his lap, ran her hands across his chest, and started sucking at his left pec, right where his heart was. The very essence of life was being drained out of the boy and into her mouth.

"You taste so creamy and good" she muffled. As his life left him, so did his blood and his muscles and even his hair. He became s skeleton slowly as everything, right down to his very should, was entered into her evil mouth. Once she was done and her lips parted, there was no body anymore. Only another pile of loose, sandy dust that she swept off the bed to lay on it alone. "That's better. Now I can do this alone..."

As the Succubus pleasured herself to a mirror, her rebellious subordinates prowled the sprawling floor for villagers they could convert with what little power they had. Their pick up line was always the same, as they had agreed upon earlier: 'Am I attractive?' Most of the time they got a mixed answer or an indirect no, but the few that said yes were taken away to separate rooms for their sessions. First to complete her gathering was the nerdy girl, who rounded up five fit but weak looking young men who always wanted a girl that they could easily overpower. Then the jock girl got the meatiest men who always wanted a girl that they could fight first and do after. Then finally the goth girl who attracted the closet-cases and occult fanatics. All of their responses to their crop was also the same: 'This will do'.

In each room, the succubi took off their clothes and indulged their infinite energy into each of their potential devotee's desires. Rampant screaming and erotic moaning was heard by the pious men and married woman from outside, but it was mostly ignored for the soft shifting that one could hear if one's breath was held from outside the queen's door. This left the girls to do as they pleased without the risk of detection.

_This is going swimmingly_ the nerd thought while in between men. The incapacitated ones were already under the metamorphic process of conversion to her ranks, and the others were too busy looking at her to care what was happening to the others. _Once I get these skin-sacks transformed, little-miss Fuck won't be able to stop us. The only bad part about this plan now is that I'll actually have to touch her gross, man-starved skin to eat her._

The jock was having similarly positive thoughts, but not on the motion at hand. _This is sex? This isn't so great. I just want to convert the last of these morons so I can kill that disgusting bitch. I hope she doesn't taste like how she looks and acts..._ and the goth girl was too in the moment of having sex and feeling it happen to care that much about her plans thereafter. Having the sex was good enough for her.

* * *

At last, nearly an hour later, the queen succubus emerged from her chamber with a satisfied grin and a cramped wrist to meet her new public. The throne room was the stage of a mass slaughter with the three succubi girls looming in the middle of the carnage.

"What is the meaning of this!?" she roared, trying to sound menacing with her Barbie-doll accent. "Why is everyone dead?"

"We killed them" growled the goth with a shining grin.

"Why did you kill them?" the queen asked angrily.

"They were in the way" the jock said with a glowing snarl.

"But who will admire me?" she worried and went to her knees. "Who will I manipulate to get my way? Who will give me my food and everything else that I want but don't want to get up to get!? You've killed me already! I'll die if I have to rely on myself! No..."

"Sob al you want" the nerdy ringleader began, "but this is perfectly righteous payback for stealing our powers in the first place."

"So we'll be taking them back, if you don't mind" the goth huffed. They drew in closer and their fiendish undead minions followed them. Soulless zombies driven on their lust for their respective masters. Rather than sucking them dry, the intelligent succubi just devoured their souls and non-essential organs to make them husks of living things that still kept a healthy glow of life.

"NOOOOOOOO!!!!!" The whorish queen shouted. The fact that her adoring public had gone as quickly as it first came was essentially the final nail in her eternal coffin, and a battle was unnecessary. The jock and goth weren't pleased.

"Let's just eat her now" the goth said. "I'm getting sick of hearing this shit."

"Agreed." said the nerd. All three descended on her and gnashed her skin apart. Once the teeth of one succubus met the skin of another, all parties were mortal enough to die. So the three consumed the girl with barely a struggle, a somewhat fitting end to the raunchy little bitch's reign as queen. Now the girls had their powers back and everything was right with the world...kinda.

* * *

The next day, the three girls requested a personal phone call with their new human sponsor, Yvonne, whom they were already off put by due to the similarities between her and her ex-advisor. At Yvonne's house, Beelzebub descretely answered the phone.

"Hello?" it said in a much practiced foreign voice. "Can I help you?"

"I wish to speak with Yvonne" a sultry as silk voice said. The one speaking on all three girl's behalf was the nerdy girl, who had regained her original form last night. Her bust seemingly exploded out into a crimson teacher's formal dress and her hips pressed at the edges of her red, leather skirt. She was the very image of sex if it wore glasses and had a Harvard Law degree.

"Yvonne" repeated the newly recreated jock. "I hate that name." She no longer resembled a man at all, but a tomboyish athletic girl. There was a certain quality about her features, including her rock-solid bust and butt, that made her look much cuter than she was in bed, as she would refuse sex with anyone who's legs would break after only one round of judo-based wrestling.

"She sounds just as stupid" the goth said "is she can't even get to the phone." Her change was the most noticeable, as she had magically lost all trace of her former unhealthy fatness. Her face and skin were still paler than white, and her makeup of oil black still made her look like a Gothic clown, but her curvy figure and Lolita dress gave notice to her body more than her odd cosmetics choice. Her dress was so frilly and lifted that the black lace of her undergarments were plainly visible.

"She'll be at the phone in a moment" the bookish girl said.

"Hello?" Yvonne said, finally at the phone.

"Hello Yvonne" the succubus greeted. "I a, just calling to inform you that you previous hellion representative has been replaced. Your orders will now be given out at any participating Victoria's Secret locations by one of us personally, so keep a watch in your mail for the special offers they send. Its a coded communique for your eyes only. Do you understand?"

"Sure" Yvonne said. "I already know there aren't any missions we need to worry about right now, though. I'll be sure to keep an eye out though. Bye-bye."

"Bye, sweety" the succubus said, hanging up. "Once she's dead we can eat her, too."

"Good plan" the jock snarled.

"My mouth is watering just thinking about it..." growled the demonic goth. Why would they want to dip again into the well of incarnate sexual flavor? These demons, who dreaded and disgusted tasting the carnal pleasures of Earth, now have the same appetite as their devoured former queen. The answer to this change is simple: sex tastes great.


	31. Lessons in Life: the Phantom

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

In Tom's apartment, there was solitude. Where the world was out to get them and the Human Negative was waiting to consume them, there was a flighting peace in the home of the killers. Killers, because Mort had agreed to move from his monk-like quarters and was now bunking officially with Tom, his friend. As a part of that agreement, Mort decided to make his own living area once he and Tom cleaned the apartment.

"That's better" Mort said, observing the real floor for the first time.

"Huh" Tom replied. "I didn't know I had a carpet like that." A power surge made all the lights flicker off. Just as quickly, they flashed back on, along with a static from one of Tom's many televisions. "Wiring must be busted in here" Tom noted.

"We turned everything off beforehand, right? Mort asked. "Even the surge-breakers." Still, Tom and Mort went into the spacious gaming room, previously a master bedroom. The static made an eerie blue glow across the walls. Tom sat down in front of it and turned slowly to Mort, the snowy-pattern reflecting in his eyes.

"They're heeeere" Tom sang. Mort looked at him very curiously for a moment. "_Poltergeist?_" Tom hinted. "Seriously? Did you even watch any movies in your life?"

"I saw the story about...what's his face" Mort said, trying to recall the details of movie night amongst murderers and rapists. "I think...it had Edward Norton in it."

"_Fight Club_?" Tom asked.

"He was a Neo-Nazi" Mort hinted.

"_American History X_" Tom answered. Mort snapped his fingers and nodded.

"FOOLS!!!" shouted a voice from the TV. Tom and Mort nearly jumped around as they looked back at the TV. An abundance of black bandages were slithering out from the screen as a sort of portal. Eventually, the ghastly form of Mul, Tom's personal go-between for hell, was in front of them in a partially holographic form. "While you leisurely discuss cinema, the world is changing! I am here to inform you of your next task?"

"Before that" Tom interrupted, unfazed by the demon's entrance and booming voice, "I have an important question for ya." Mul paused in his dramatic pose, then relented and appeared in his most physical form of billowing, black robes and bandages with no actual body to speak of. He made a hollow sigh and lowered his hood, as he had no head to express his agitation with.

"What?" he asked.

"Can I possibly make a request for my next hit?" Tom asked. Mort was curious and leaned in.

"I don't know" Mul said. "Probably not, but I'm sure you're going to try anyway, right?"

"Maybe" Tom said. "In any case, if I can't get my own hit, can I at least look up someone's soul information, or whatever, based on a codename or signature?"

"Hell and Interpol are two very different things" Mul explained. "I suggest, if you have a codename, you call in the MI-5, or whatever the hell it is."

"James Bond worked for the MI-6" Mort pointed out. "I read a lot of those books in prison...and I saw a movie once. Hated it." Mul once again sighed and hit his imaginary forehead with his skeletal hand.

* * *

"So, we have no mission?" Tom confirmed.

"Yes" Mul said, being serious once more. "To my knowledge, Satan has gotten no more word on expected payments. Rest assured, however, that there are terrible sinners out in the world who won't hesitate to make a deal with the devil himself. Always be on guard!"

"How do I make this stuff, Tom?" Mort called from the kitchen.

"What stuff?" Tom called back.

"Ramen" Mort said. "I know it's easy, but how easy should it be?"

"Just boil some water, drop the noodles in and wait for them to get limp" Tom instructed. "Then turn off the burner, stir them around a bit to separate them, pour in the flavoring and mix it again. That's it."

"Fair enough" Mort said. "I'll figure this out."

"Hey, sit down man" Tom offered his spectral friend. "You wanna play some games for a while. You must not have much work to do besides, right?"

"Well" Mul stalled, sitting his ass-less form on the floor, "it's not that I have nothing to do. No one wants me to do anything."

"Why not?" Tom asked. "You can possess gaming networks. Dozens of desperate, talentless teens around the globe must want you to give them a chance in games."

"Video games aren't something we take souls for in Hell" Mul said with a solemn tone.

"Too bad" Tom said. "You could double your revenue." Tom picked up a controller and, in an act of unconscious kindness, offered one to Mul as well. Mul mulled it over for a few seconds, then decided to take the offer humbly.

"I guess I've got time" Mul said. The game started up, a co-operative campaign was chosen, and Tom logged he and Mul into the game world. It was a sort of brawler, with avatars running around at random and slicing and bashing with whatever weapon was on hand. "Whats' the goal?" Mul asked.

"Not the right question" Tom said. "The right question is 'which button kills them?'"

"I can see partly why you are a killer, then" Mul said, finally starting his own game up, fighting random enemies on the screen. "You have the mind for one, as I have seen before."

"When?" Tom asked. "And how? Do you guys watch us fight in Hell?"

"We can" Mul said "and I have the time to do so. You became quite mindless and automatic during the Squeegee fight, remember? You even sounded mechanical."

"Yeah, that happens" Tom said. "It usually only happens when I get seriously pissed off at something, like cheaters or campers."

"Campers?" Mul questioned. "Why would you hate outdoorsmen? They should never bother you with your lifestyle."

"Wrong definition" Tom said. "In gaming, campers stay in one spot and kill anyone they see without ever moving. It's usually a really goo spot, too, and they usually avoid death just by the sheer stupidity of those fighting them."

"Have you ever camped?" Mul asked.

"I did when I didn't know any better" Tom admitted, "but now I find it best to move from a sweet spot after a few good hits or kills. It shakes things up a bit for the enemy team."

"Ah" Mul said.

* * *

After a few hours, Tom was completely into his game and Mul was getting into it just the same. Even Mort decided to sit and watch out of boredom. "Nice combo" Mort praised to Mul.

"Thanks" Mul said. "I wish I knew how I did it..."

"Just keep mashing" Tom said. He was skillfully exploiting the terrain and the jumping glitches in the game now that they decided to play online. Mul stayed in a group of other people wielding a similar weapon while Tom went off on his own and tore everything, NPC and human player, to pieces with no effort at all. "I got this. The roof should be open."

"Great" Mul said. "We're going in already. Now what should we do?"

"Kill everyone" Tom said. "That's all you ever need to do in this game."

"It's so simplistic" Mul pointed out, "but so difficult to stay alive against seasoned fighters. It's just like your situation."

"How so" Mort asked.

"You're all, for the most part, amateurs" Mul said. "As far as professional killing and assassination goes, you've got eons to go. And your enemies thus far haven't exactly been pushovers, you know? They've been targeted for hits before."

"I didn't know that" Mort said. "So, even I am and amateur?"

"You have different experience" Mul said. "According to the files, Sam has the intellegence and tools ,you have the raw strength, Thomas here supposedly has the skill, and Yvonne had the hidden emotional trauma associated with the perfect killer. There were plans early on of just taking you four and combining you to make a perfect murderous being, but the theorized results were never good for us."

"That so?" Tom said. It seemed, in the course of Mul's talking, Tom had won the game by exploiting a secret that instantly killed the level boss from below. "What was the worst case scenario?"

"That the perfect killer would go beyond Satan's control" Mul explained, "and start a genocidal rampage. Eventually, if Hell couldn't stop it, the world would be consumed in dark energy and destroyed."

"Harsh" Tom said.

"Good thing you didn't do it" Mort said. "It's just our luck that Satan has a weak point for human sympathy, right?"

"It's nothing like that" Mul said. "If the planet is destroyed, Hell can easily remake it. It only takes a few days, honestly, to reset all space and time. It just depends on the tragedy that occurs." This left Mort in a bit of a shock. Tom was listening in out of fascination, but now Mort was interested out of fear.

"Please" Mort said softly, "go on."

"Well," Mul began, "most every human life and emotion is recorded in Hell, like a TiVo of reality. Reali-TiVo. All we would have to do is wait for an incident like global extinction to pass, then rewind the tape, analyze the data, find the source of destruction, remove it from reality, then let time go on normally."

"Then what is the end?" Mort asked. "If Heaven and Hell can control the flow of time, how can a great culling of life, and Apocalypse, really have a lasting effect on humanity?"

"The biblical Apocalypse" Mul started, "is just a bunch of paranoia and bullshit. The real Apocalypse is an event that cannot be deciphered caused by a source that cannot be pulled out from reality. When the end of the world really comes, we'll know it, and we'll just wait form something new to happen rather than try in vain to correct a problem we can't solve."

"Sounds complicated" Tom said while Mort was in philosophical shock.

"The mathematics of reality are _very_ complicated" Mul said. "Wait until your dead. Life doesn't get any more confusing then when you go to Hell, trust me..."

"That didn't make any sense!" Tom shouted.

"The game started" Mul said. Tom snapped back to the screen and started hurriedly moving his fingers. Mort became dazed that night, an eternity of information passing through his mind like a runaway train. He went to bed very early in the spare room while Tom and Mul stayed up all night playing games. They enjoyed each others company greatly, especially Mul who promised upon leaving to sped more time with his human friends more often. Mort's head continued to spin, as the winds of his fate were caught in a sudden whirlwind.

This experience had taught him to appreciate the frivolous pointlessness of his existence and a new meaning of fear, as now he knew an end was inevitable. On the other hand, upon reflection of his favorite Ian Flemming books, the thoughts of an end already coming and being superseded by Hells awesome system of cut/paste was terrifying. There was the chance that Mort, himself, was at the center of existence, and he had already died at some point, but was just easily and thoughtlessly replaced by the mechanics of Hell. This and many more quandaries forced Mort's back to stay on the floor for the better part of the next day.

Tom, on the other hand, took the advice on the pointlessness of contacting anyone on an assumed lead and spent his day eating and playing more games. He learned from the newspaper heading of 'World Economy and America's Politics in Grave Danger!' that only one thing was an absolute: Everyone, everywhere loves to unwind with some gruesomely violent games!


	32. Lessons in Life: the Maniac

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

In an inconsequential area of the city Nny dwelt within he was taking a walk. On this walk he saw some rats in the street. They looked diseased, so he threw food at them to get them to leave him alone. Further down on his walk he saw some dead rats in an alley. He threw food at them for the ironic humor he saw in it, laughed, and went on his way. Further still on his walk he saw a man, a perfectly normal man whistling as he marched down the street with his backpack and his...pants. This random pleasant demeanor in a terrible world gave Nny the sinking feeling to commit mischief to the individual.

"Oh life's so good" the man sang to himself. "Life's so good and I feel great! I feel like I just ate pudding! Which I did but that's not the point..."

"Hey man" Nny said, looming ahead with a cloak of depressing shadows around him. "Why so glum?"

"Me, glum?" the man asked. "No, chum. I'm feeling great!"

"Why?" Nny asked.

"I just paid my student loans!" the man said with a smile. "My life has never been better!"

"Oh, you'd think so" Nny said, hovering in closer, "but you're wrong. You see, now that you're out of debt, the banks won't deal with you anymore. They have no leverage against you and you aren't giving them anymore money. The banks will abandon you like they already have the rest of the private citizens of this country."

"I don't think that's how it works, pal" the man defended. "No one's going to turn on me!"

"Not even your wife?" Nny continued to prod. "Are you sure she isn't out having some affair? And what about you, looking at any girl who passes you by with carnal indulgence. Doesn't that make your life less worth it?"

"My wife would never cheat" the man said proudly. "She was raised an upstanding, Catholic woman like I a man, and would have such repentant guilt over any misdeed that she wouldn't be able to live with herself. One of her sisters cut off her hand as repentance for masturbating as a teenager, you know. And I swore myself to a sacred oath of monogamy, one which I love and honor with every breath."

"What about the sky?" Nny continued in a horrifically depressed tone. "It might rain later."

"A little water never hurt you" the man cheered. "I'm sorry your outlook is so dower, but there's no reason to be sour! Just let your heart shine and an a great life will be...thine!" The man started strutting happily away, leaving Nny to grin with glaring white teeth under his veil of doom and shade.

"You're right, good sir" Nny began. "My life is much better than yours." This made the man stop and back up out of curiosity.

"It is?" the man asked neutrally.

"I understand suffering" Nny preached, "and thusly I can understand pleasure. I have walked through Hell and am much closer to Heaven than you. Through my life I have seen and, more often, committed ungodly atrocities in the name of the cosmic order, blindly following an imperceptive hand with infinite zeal! And it is through such a life of arduous pain and misery has made me strong in every sense! My mind can blaze through the dark fog of the world and navigate any labyrinth. I have gone through Hell so many times I have a preferred customers discount! My life is easy because I can deal with hardships, but what about you?" The man was already in shock over Nny's assertions, but he stood still and anticipated the bad news Nny would continued to deliver.

"What if you wife slipped an inch?" Nny asked. "In her fragile mental state of religious absolution, she would break and die inside. All you would have left to procreate with would be a husk of death. No emotions or mind to raise any children with, only the body of a dirtied woman! And what about the debt that inevitably waits you? They say that only debt and bad TV shows are the surest things in life. Something will happen to you, and because you live in such a radiant place of sunshine and blind merriment, you will not be able to deal with it. Anything bad could happen to me now and I would surpass it. I am strong. I know what pain is, I understand how the universe works! You...do not." The man's eye twitched in shock and utter disbelief. His mouth was puckered in the sourness of the moment. All his happiness left him for the demon-faced stranger that smoothly walked by him with a smile.

"Ah" Nny sighed, "it's fun to bullshit with strangers. They're so interesting..." The man committed suicide by walking in front of a bus. He couldn't deal with Nny at all, mostly because of how right he was.

* * *

Now that his walk was over and night began to set, Nny sat upon the rails of a bridge over the scenic river to reflect upon his actions thus far.

"You know I should name you" Nny said looking at the moon. A trail of cigarette smoked signaled the proper entrance of the mysterious manifest from Nny's inner mind.

"Why?" the woman said, this time dressed again in blatantly Victorian clothing and gray makeup on her black eyes.

"That's what people do with pets" Nny said. "I'd feel bad eventually if I just called you 'you' or' bitch' or...'you bitch'."

"I don't need a name" she demanded, hovering over to the rail and gazing outward. "I am only what you need me to be, and thus, I am not a pet."

"Then what are you?" Nny asked.

"You remember your last pet, don't you?" she asked.

"That lizard?" Nny replied, referencing something so foggy and bland in his memory that he had to question his own response.

"The rabbit" she replied. Nny's face first came to a look of surprise, then of nostalgic glee, then of dark shame that shaded his brow. "The one you nailed to the wall...what did you call it?"

"Nailbunny" Nny relied. "That was different. He was my conscience, my morality."

"Is that why he was undead?" she asked. Nny took a moment to think about his answer so he couldn't look stupid in front of his inner thoughts. "What morals do you follow now, if any?"

"Necessity" Nny said. Well, he lied. "Well, I lie. I do a lot of unnecessary things, but I can use psychosomatic reasoning make myself think they need to be done. That's how amazing I am."

"Amazing is hardly the proper word" she said. "You're a level or two below that, maybe your astounding or surprising. Amazing is a phrase saved only for people who understand the qualifications to the fullest and most minute detail. You can't even tie a shoe."

"It's not necessary" Nny said. "That's why my boots have latches."

"Why are you so fixated upon the reasoning of a cockroach?" she asked, skittering closer with a myriad of chaotic clacking feet under the frock of her dress.

"Existentialism is dangerous in incautious minds" Nny said. She stopped to listen to his aside. "There's a dangerously steep slope that borders the line of self-actualization and total nihilism. I jump over that line a long time ago, and only recently have I been able to claw and panic my way back up to the great peak of self-satisfactory philosophy. The universe is an unknowing, and unknown pawn to my will. I shape the distance in front of my with every blink of my eye. My thoughts are the echoes of the chaotic order that everything exists on. That is the optimism that I missed out on, that all Super-Goths and Emos out there miss out on!" She took a bored drag from her cigarette as Nny jumped up in excitement and started pacing like a rabid preacher across the bridge.

"So what if the world sucks!?" Nny shouted. "It only sucks because that's what you believe. If you stop and see the pleasant things, the minute things that can bring a smile to your face, you can shape the world around those things. No limits that you don't already control to weigh you down, either! I have already eliminated most of the logical barriers in my mind, and the world has gratefully played along to them! Watch!" Nny pulled a revolver out from his inner jacket pocket, pulled back the hammer, and pointed it at his head. "I have eliminated the need to die, so what will happen when I shoot myself!?"

"HEY!" a random man shouted in concern. "What're you doing, man? Put down the gun!"

"No, it's okay" Nny said, waving his hand and stepping chaotically away. "Something will happen. The universe won't let me die!"

"You're crazy" the man shouted back. "Just drop the damn gun!"

"Nah" Nny said. His finger tensed at the trigger, the hammer pulled back further, and the man came rushing in to save him. He tackled Nny, forced his thin arm into the air, and the gun fired into the sky. Nny, meanwhile, forced the aggressive man off of him and dusted off his back.

"Are you fucked up?" the mans asked. "Are you high? Thinking you're immortal or invincible, what's wrong with you...?" Nny just looked at him with a cracked grin and tired eyes. He retrieved his gun, put it back in the shadows that hid it, and walked away. The silent specter of Nny's conscience observed the whole time. "Fucking weirdo, Goth freak. Go ahead and turn yourself into a damn hospital, will ya!?" Suddenly, from above, came the ominous sounds of an impending crash. The bullet struck something foreign in the sky, some strange object, that now plummeted down at the panicked man's head. He stood shock-still and let the downed helicopter kill him.

"I don't believe in dying" Nny said arrogantly, grinning menacingly, "but he did. He did because his morals dictate that the laws of science and nature can't be disrupted by people in the world. He believed with all his being that everything dies..." A moment of strange silence, then an explosion in the distance and the roaring of sudden fire from the downed news copter. "Everything burns, but not everything can die..."

* * *

Now, after the scene o the helicopter crash had drawn the attention of the better half of the populous, Nny retreated to watch the sunrise at the top of a precarious cliff-face at the outskirts of town. There he stayed all night, silent and observant of all the goings on of the tiny people in their tiny cars and whatnot, and formulated a thought.

"It's pretty plain..." Nny said. His phantasmal escort came into scene out of nowhere with a drawn breath of smoke and a blank stare into the sky. "When something happens, people come flocking to it from all over, expecting something amazing. They always expect the best things to happen and fool themselves into thinking they have the best intentions by checking it out. Morons...fools...cookie cut-outs."

"What?" she said.

"Ah, I'm hungry" Nny answered. "So far, my only persuasive arguments have been about what food to eat when I go back to the city."

"You should eat soon" she said, "you're basically dying right now."

"Meh" Nny shrugged off. He took a few mores steps toward the dangerous edge of the cliff and looked down. From his eyes he could see the chaotically drawn scene of the unmoving forest change slowly into the shifting currents of a black and whits sea. An ocean of ink now stretched out in all directions, and he stood at the top of the only land for an infinite stretch of vision. There was only he, the crop of land he stood upon, and an infinite, ethereal scene of thrashing water and a blank sky. Nny was drowned for a moment in the wonder of his vision, and he fell.

"The universe loves you" his conscience said, looking down over the edge of the cliff where a branch snagged Nny's jacket and again allowed him do defy death. "Why don't you love it?"

"I don't love things" Nny responded, crossing his arms and legs relaxedly. "I just understand the necessity of feelings is a lot lower on my priority list of becoming a bug. Whatever the universe feels, good for it, I don't want to feel anything like it..." So Nny was able to observe the mountainous rising of the sun over the billowing smoke of the downed copter and the pillars of buildings in front of him. "Ah, that's beautiful..." he noted.

The lesson to be learned: Goths and Emos are nihilistic pussies because they don't know what Existentialism is!!!


	33. Lessons in Life: Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

We now turn our attention to young Todd, or Squee as he is more popularly known, and his story of self-realization. It started out as a normal day with an unexpected school cancellation on the news. Squee and his brother sat in the living room that morning, still in their night clothes, and watched the announcement on the news. In the background was a burning building.

"It seems" the aged anchorman reported, "that a band of arsonists stopped by the school last night and burned it down. Down to the ground...yep."

"Huh" Pepito lazily grunted, "whadya know?"

"Did you do that?" Todd asked. Pepito shook his head, rubbing his horns against the carpet floor. Their mother came in, already dressed in her super-mom dress for the day, and picked up their used cereal bowls.

"Oh" she noted at the TV. "Looks like you boys get a vacation day, huh?"

"Yeah, looks like it" Todd said, treating the situation with a tone of abnormality. "Now what?"

"Video games" Pepito lazily cheered.

"I don't think so" his mother chided. Pepito groaned very loudly at her as she walked out, but she didn't leave the room just then. "You boys have done nothing but play on the gaming machines everyday! I want you two to go out and get fresh air."

"But outside is stupid" Pepito argued. "_Hermano_,back me up here!" Todd just shrugged. He was honestly more than eager and ready to get outside and breath some good, fresh air after all the gaming they had done. "Grr. Damn you, Squee."

"Go on outside, little Peppy" the mother cooed as she rubbed the devil-child's head maternally. She gave Todd a light hug as well, confident the boys would go their way out soon enough. Todd and Pepito went to their respective rooms to change and enjoy a day out on the town. While in his room, Todd caught sight of some kind of obscure sight from his closet door. In his early years, he would have thought it was a monster of some kind, but his able teen brain quickly discerned a much more likely thing and he opened the door.

"Hi Shmee" Todd said, picking up his teddy bear. One of the eyes had long ago fallen out now, revealing the curious black fuzz beneath. The formerly childish smile it sported was now twisted nefariously up to the menacing, glaring eye level it held. The bear was bad, a continuous long-range fear sponge for Squee since nearly his birth. "You look pretty beat up. Maybe mom can fix you up..." It was then that Todd had to sit down, bear in hand, and think.

"...mom..." he repeated. "It's taken a while, but now I can really call her my mom. She's always looking out for me, although she tends o overdo it, and her heart's always in the right place. She's much better than my real, er, my previous mother. You know what, Shmee? I'm actually really happy that I'm here. I love my family, this one, and they all love me. I've always wondered what this feeling of acceptance would feel like, the feeling of someone perpetually loving you just for living. It's...it's awesome!"

"Hey Squee!" Pepito shouted, banging on the door. Todd just now realized that he was spacing, dropped the bear and threw on a shirt. "Hurry up! We only have so long before we can sneak back in and play games all day!"

"I heard that!" his mother called form downstairs. Todd laughed a bit before heading out the door and joining his brother. Then they both went, side by side and hands in pockets out the door. Shmee stayed behind...

* * *

"Let's pick up the irksome bitch first" Pepito suggested.

"You mean Lenna?" Todd asked.

"That's what I said" Pepito said. He pulled out his demonic cell phone from hell, a _Nokia_, and dialed the number. Then he held it up to Todd's face. "You talk to her. I enjoy being able to hear from day to day and don't want to risk that listening to her."

"You really don't like her, do you?" Todd asked. "What's she ever done to you?"

"She existed around me too much" Pepito answered. "Give her a year or two of constant jabbering and you'll be just like me...without the horns, though."

"Hello?" the phone asked. It was a gentlemanly, lifting voice on the other end. "Who is this?" with a lisp.

"Uh, this is Todd...um...Diablo" Todd answered, unsure if he was using the name correctly. Pepito gave him a grin and a thumb up, also unsure totally of what the proper last name was for his family. "Is Lenna there?"

"Yes, just a moment" the effeminate voice said. Foots walked on floor, up steps and a door opened. Feint voices were heard, one of them definitely Lena's, and she finally picked up the phone.

"Hello Todd!" she cheered. "What's up?"

"Well" Todd started, "since there's no school today, Pepito and I decided to just hang out in town for a while. You want to come along with us?"

"EEEEEEE!!!!" She squealed happily. Todd drew the phone back from his ear quickly and clenched his teeth with the sharp ringing he heard. "Oh, totally! Sure! Definitely! YES!...is Peppy going to be there?"

"Uh, yeah" Todd replied.

"Oh, okay then" she said, slightly less enthusiastic as before. "I'll meet you guys at the _StarDicks_ on 5th, kay?"

"Alright, we'll see you there" Todd replied. "Bye." He hung up the phone, closed it and tossed it to his brother. Then he proceeded to reel in pain and hold his ringing ear as Pepito watched him cockily.

"You hate her yet?" Pepito asked.

"Not quite" Todd answered. "I'll give it a year, like you said." Pepito hissed out laughter at his still reeling brother. They continued to walk down through the suburban streets into the outskirts of bustling downtown. They eventually arrived at the super-conglomerate coffee establishment founded in some godless land that didn't even serve real coffee, and Lenna was eagerly waiting them. Once all three were together again, they continued on their aimless venture, Todd in the middle of Pepito and Lenna.

"So, now what?" Lenna asked the boys.

"We're not sure" Pepito said frightfully. "Without video-games to guide us, we have no way of knowing how our lives are supposed to go!"

"Honestly?" Lenna said skeptically. Pepito started to hiss and snicker, and Todd just faced forward with a light grin. Lenna quickly picked up on his good mood and nearly jumped him for it, suddenly throwing her arms around his neck and dragging him to a stop. "Aw, are you two having some brotherly bonding time?"

"Sort of" Todd answered. "We bond all the time when we play games."

"Untrue" Pepito interjected. "I only bond with my ability to curse people out. You should see him play though. He's a cold-blooded machine in those war games!"

"I'm just good at them" Todd said bashfully. "You don't have to categorize me as a budding serial killer or anything."

"Ah" Pepito thoughtfully began, "but I do." He marched on, but left his brother and Lenna in a daze of confusion and, oddly, fear. He was the Anti-Christ, after all, and his very presence was supposed to provoke untold human leagues of fear. It would only make sense that seeing him smile and walk away with an air of well-worn confidence in what he just said would terrify poor Squee.

* * *

"ARCADE!" Pepito gleefully shouted. He skipped across the street giggling madly and entered the huge building. It was a futuristic wonderland of curious gadgets and post-modern renovations. There was a huge, black extension jutting from the far wall, between which was a myriad of playable machines. Racing chairs and standing shooting platforms and even simulation helicopters were just three of the wonderful machines Pepito beheld. He was nearly dancing with excitement, but was unaware as of yet that he was alone. Todd and Lenna both conversed their joint opinion of entereing the video wonderland.

"Do you want to?" she asked.

"Kind of" Todd replied. "I don't want my life right now to be just about video games. I'd like to do something else but..."

"But what?" Lenna asked, hanging from his arm. Todd struggled with making his decision on the spot, but still considered all the possible routes from here. He could leave his brother, who wouldn't care either way, and go do something else. There was a library not too far away, there was a mall a bus trip away, there was a park full of squirrels...and then he considered Lenna into his plans. What would he do, or could he do, with a Gothic-Lolita vampire clinging to his arm?

...the most obvious answer was of course hormone related, so he shook it off and sighed to make his final verdict.

"Will black-lights hurt your skin?" Todd asked, as he was prepared to cross the street and enter the arcade.

"Nope" Lenna said. "I'm wearing sunblock!"

"Okay then" Todd said. "Let's go inside." So they did, and they played games for a while. Lenna mainly just hovered over Todd the whole time as he played whatever games he could. It wasn't busy, as the arcade itself was just newly opened and a school-closing wasn't expected that day. However, as the day waned on, more kids from school were coming in and noticeably avoiding Pepito and his gang. It was just like school now, only with more virtual bullets.

"I am bored with this game now" Pepito announced to the other player.

"That's just cause you're losing!" Lenna said snidely, sticking her tongue out.

"Hey" Todd called, "lets' try that one." He pointed at the huge, almost alien black craft built in the wall, but Pepito looked around in that direction for something else.

"Is that a game?" Lenna asked.

"The manager said its a virtual battle-field kind of game. It's still a prototype, but it's free to play."

"Freeeee!" Pepito cheered. "Let's go! All three of us! We shall dominate the virtual world with our hellish flames of wrath and doom!"

"Doooooooooooom!" Lenna droned jokingly. Todd smiled and followed his sibling into the black room. There were closet-sized compartments for each individual player to don their helmet and gloves to fight, All the controls were on the mechanical power gloves, and a moving platform underneath controlled movement the same way a treadmill prevents it. Once inside the game world, the players were equipped with basic pistols and melee knives, then set out into the fray to fight off the offending players.

* * *

"BALLS!" Pepito screamed into the sky.

"We really sucked at that game" Lenna said, slumping after Todd. "If I knew how to play games at all, we might have done better. And if the helmet fit Peppy we might have at least survived a few more...seconds. That one guy was just too much..." Todd didn't have any comments on the match. He felt oddly fulfilled by just being in that game. Someone had taken the cheap route and exploited the flaws in the game's programming that allowed them to shoot through walls. It didn't bother Todd like it did everyone else, though.

"SHIT!" Pepito sounded again. "That cock-sucker! I'm gonna do something drastic and stupid to him!"

"Do you have to?" Todd asked. Pepit turned around curiously. "He was just a nobody who couldn't fight us plainly and knew it. He cheated because he couldn't find any other way to deal with us. If you think about it like that, we really won."

"Kya!" Lenna shouted, jumping onto his shoulders once again, "you're so optimistic, Todd!"

"Yeah" Pepito admitted. He closed his devil phone and kept walking. His impatience had embarrassed him once more, but he couldn't be angry about it. His brother was much more human than he was anyway. Perhaps that is the lesson here:

One can mature quickly around those who are not mature.


	34. The Super Infedel and the Kill Stealer

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Now the week of rest was over and the killers waited on edge for their next phone call. First, Satan's phone rang as a debt collector relayed the information about the next bounty head to him. Then Remsius, leading consort of the hellish contest, was given his specific instructions for the killers. He spread the word around through the other killer's personal representatives. Mul was on his way to Tom and Mort's house when he got the news, the Succubus sisters were phoned in the middle of an orgy with their share of info, and Sam was told personally by Remsius the details of the mission.

"Is that it?" Sam said, using a nefarious finger-pyramid in the dark of his office, aiming it at the stitch-faced demon.

"Unfortunately" Remsius said. "If we knew anything else, we'd be sure to tell you all the same thing.

"I suppose it's enough to work with" Sam said with a sigh. He stood up and turned to the window to observe the bright lights that lit up his city. Yes, his city.

"Very well, then" Remsius said with a bow. "I shall leave you to consider your actions...you have about an hour to mobilize."

"..." Sam wittily retorted. He waited for the better part of five minutes, just watching the rolling clouds in the sky and squinting to see the dim little stars.

"It's always watching" hissed a startling voice in the room. Sam turned slowly around and saw, standing in his office, a short man with a chef's hat. Upon his chest was the written word 'FUCK' and his eyes contained thick-red spirals rather than the normal iris or pupil.

"I'm tired of that catchphrase" Sam said. "Think of something unique."

"Okay" the midget fiend said. IT took a second, but a new phrase was soon concocted. "Hey! That's MY sammich!!!"

"Good enough" Sam sighed. He retrieved his horrific gun from out of his desk ,made sure it was loaded and put it in his inner jacket holster. "What's the good word, Mr. Boy?"

"It's just Doughboy now" replied the demonic short thing. "Eff and D are no longer, as He doesn't use us anymore. Instead, we have become one horrible creature and together we will find Him...and kill Him. That is who we are. Don't forget it."

"Whatever" Sam said. "Your initial interest of being a corporeal manifestation made flesh through some arcane stupidity has long since become boring. It's not like I don't read any H.P. Lovecraft."

"Whatever yourself" Doughboy mocked. "I have more news than that weakling demon had!"

"Do you now?" Sam asked, still maintaining a very bored and business tone.

"Your target is a ghost" it explained, "a soul that escaped miraculously from Hell to inhabit the body of an unwilling host to wreak havoc on the Earth. Unfortunately, that soul has no interest in havoc and only wants to disrupt the order of the religious world by testifying in a church and opening the ground up beneath him in the process. He wants to eliminate faith as a human action."

"I don't see how going back to Hell will help him do that..." Sam admitted. "If he repents at the alter and gets sent back to Hell, people's faith will get even further renewed. His plan is for naught."

"Have you met these kinds of people?" Doughboy lowed. "They aren't exactly smart. If a man claims to be reborn and renewed of his sins sudden;y bursts into flames and gets thrown back into the afterlife, who _can_ be forgiven. A demon traveling from Hell to find the light of Jesus and being denied...who _won't_ be denied? It's sort of an extremist approach, but these people are quite extreme in their belief."

"...I get it now." Sam said. "Still, why is this important information?"

"Because he has anticipated getting hunted" Doughboy said. "He wants to die at the alter. However, Remsius didn't tell you that. If one of your moron competitors kills him inside a church or in front of a preacher of any kind, his plan will succeed."

"...I see" Sam said at last. "I'm leaving then. Thank you."

"Ah!" Doughboy shouted, grabbing Sam's arm as he passed. For a foam cut-out, his strength was phenomenal. "We have a deal."

"Of course" Sam said. He reached into his inner breast pocket and slipped out a photograph. He handed it to his demonic accomplice, who seethed openly and shook the picture in his hand as Sam left. He stepped out into the hallway, where his guards had been mysteriously and silently slaughtered, and entered his elevator to leave.

"I'm coming down" Sam said over a personal intercom in the lift. "Prepare a car and a team of guards."

"Yes sir" the other voice responded.

* * *

Elsewhere, said demon was blissfully walking down the street doing whatever he could to ensure his plan to see fruition. He was seen nearly dancing down the sidewalk with a dirty smile on his face. He gave money to the poor and homeless, he helped children with math problems in the middle of the street, he tripped thieves who tried to get away with other people's goods, and in doing so he won the heart and faith of all who saw him.

_Half way done the demon told himself. All that's left to do is get killed. Maybe easier said than done. These hunters don't have the best records from what I've heard down in the pit... Suddenly his thoughts were broken apart by the screeching of tires that peeled out from around the corner. _This alerted a number of people it seemed, as the entire populous was watching that corner for some manic driver to come roaring out to endanger their lives.

"This" Tom growled behind the wheel "is how you DRIVE!"

"NO!" Mort yelled from the backseat, "this is how you DIE DRIVING!!!" From around the corner in their old and driven car the great pair of shovel and bullets came tearing across the street on two wheels. Then, loudly and with a hard impact, they landed and kept going along.

"You see him yet?" Tom asked. Mort braced himself and looked carefully through his black goggles. By meditating he could feel the winds of fate as they circled around the unfortunate victim somewhere out on the street. His goggles allowed him to see the most intricate of movements in the normal and cosmic patterns of the moving wind. He could see the ties of fate wrapped around every individual but one: and that was the target.

"That man!" Mort shouted, pointing very clearly to Tom.

"YEAAAAHHH!" Tom bellowed. He turned the wheel and started the task of running down an individual in a crowd of people. Not only that, but this man was now in the scope of his adoring public. Not wanting his plan to prematurely fail, the possessed man started running at full speed away, which for a demon-possessed man was far greater than any normal man's full speed.

"Screw these guys!" the possessed man said to himself. "They aren't stopping me this quickly after I just insulted their timely-ness! It'll make me look like a dick!" So he ran away while Tom violated traffic laws that he was unaware mattered when chasing a society-ruining demon.

"He's turning left" Mort notified.

"Okay" Tom shouted. "We're going right!"

"Understood" Mort said. He leaned in closer and peered deeply through the windshield. He could see the best course for tricking the target out and nailing him against a wall of death. However, in plotting a course through the winds of fate, he saw a particularly pink wind come barreling through down the street the target ran down. Yvonne was hanging out of the door of a car with doors like sliding garage doors, and a sleek futuristic look. It was basically a DeLorean, but it wasn't. She had her tongue out and was waving her bat overhead with a horrific grin. The man wasn't looking her way and was about to get his head smashed off.

_You think this will really work?_ Beelzebub asked from inside her extremely curled and billowing hair.

"Of course it will" Yvonne said. "I haven't gotten one yet, which means that God is again favoring his favoritest creation to win: ME!" Her loud proclamation of self was what alerted her target, forcing him to turn and try to clock with his two feeble human arms. They were destroyed promptly upon contact with Yvonne's heavy metal bat, but he was still alive and able to run. Yvonne, dressed in disturbingly fetish-driven Lolita clothes complete with pumpkin-sized panties with polka dots, looked back with a look of utter disgust and slammed herself back in the door. Her driver spun around perfectly and started driving once more with a loud peeling.

"Well, I hit him" Yvonne defended to her buggy partner.

"Damn these hunters!" the demon cursed. "I'll escape them and kill God if I die trying! Although...that's the point..." Suddenly, a shock of unworldly terror shot through the demon's ethereal body. From an entire block away, a man in glasses stared down the barrel of a chrome gun. Before the demon could appropriately curse his luck, a shot that broke the air and blasted the sound of thunder sounded out. Again, unconsciously, the demon raised its shattered arms to intercept the shot, but instead had to walk away without an upper chest and only a collar bone to support his neck.

"...Fuck!?" the demon shouted. Sam was thrown back from the power of his shot into the side of a building. Human though he was, he was able to shake off the pain in his back and pop his arm back into joint again. Peering through his telescopic lenses, he saw the demon had indeed left, and more than half the body's blood was splattered all around.

* * *

"This is nothing" the demon muttered in a dark alley. "I can heal this quickly. It'll still look pretty fucked up, but that's good! I can use that bruising appearance to my advantage when I get to a church! They'll think I'm...homeless or something, then I'll undo the healing and explode all over the damn priest! Squishy organs and poo-juice from my colon all over the walls and in his mouth! Humans will lose faith and heart in Jesus and Heaven once on random sheep gets slaughtered, and the world will fall to shambles!!! GAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! Hitler would have loved me like a damn son!"

"Hnnnnnnn..." growled the voice of a hideously animal voice. The demon man had to look all around with a jump to find any trace of what made such a beastly roar. "What have we here?" it growled again. "Hnn-n-n-n-n-n-nnnnn..." Such a laugh, one full of imperceptible terror and evil, filled the pitch black air and the demon's soul with fear.

"Who's there!?" the demon shouted. He heard the ruffle of cloth overhead, a sure sign of movement. He could hear the landing steps of feet and the quick fluttering of more cloth as those feet jumped away. Off the walls unseen and other surfaces all around the unknown figure jumped and fled from the demon's sight. "if you won't show yourself I'll just find you! I can divert any source of power and heat into any part of my host's body to increase the power of whatever I want!" So the demon dramatically reddened his host's eyes and pierced through the darkness to see everything in front of him. There was litter, a dumpster, a hobo and a covered manhole.

"It's not the hobo" the voice taunted, again going off into its terrible laughter. The demon started to panic and rerouted some blood from his host's legs into his head and neck to enhance the senses and allow rapid head-turning. The demon began whipping his host's head around enough to break his neck. Then his neck did break and the body fell limp at once.

"Shits!" the demon cursed. "Easy fix, just two seconds."

"How amusing" the voice taunted more. "You think you have _two_ seconds. Hellion, I shall warn you, you have not _one _second on this earth!" Then, from behind, descended the killer. From around the corner screeched Tom and Mort, just in time to storm through the alley where so much chaotic destiny wind swirled.

"It's down here" Mort said. "You go in front."

"Yeah, sure" Tom griped, drawing his sword, "send the virgin with a lot to live for to fight the blood-thirsty demon first! You're a real pal!" Mort sighed and let Tom rush forward. Then he heard Thomas laugh in the darkness and decided it was alright. It was his humor catching him off guard again. "Watch the hobo" Tom warned Mort behind him. Suddenly, the lights on the walls hanging over the back doors to the various buildings in the alley came on.

"Dammit" the owner of the evil voice cursed. He was wrapped in the most sadistic black cloth and leather one could perceive and held a sword covered entirely in the blood of the corpse he stood over. Even his face was covered by a vexing dark veil of leather with nails sticking out in all directions. Tom was taken aback when he saw this evil vissage and had to step back a bit. Mort didn't break his gait until he saw Tom backing up and thought the worst. Indeed, by the chunkey giblets strewn about, the fight was over before it ever began. "I miscalculated this. My bad."

"What the hell!?" Tom shouted. "Who are you? How'd you kill a demon?"

"The Pope of Popeland blessed my sword" the vigilante explained. "Now then, Hell Hunters, I must bid you farewell. Keep your guard up...especially you Thomas Quindale!" And in a flash of blurry black he was gone. Carrying a hintful disdain for Tom upon growling his name, both men were left stunned in the alley with the hobo until the demons came to collect the soul they searched for...

"...Jormungandr..." Tom whispered.

"Who?" Mort asked.

"Jorganumd...gar" Tom stuttered "....Jourgas...Um...I'll tell you later..." And so ends the latest tale in the epic legacy of the mighty killers! What a disappointment! Incidentally Yvonne was still unwittingly searching for the prey on top of her car wielding a shotgun. Sam arrived just as late as Tom and Mort with only a sigh of disgust to offer.

"What a waste of good information" he lamented.


	35. The Diverging Paths of Hell

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

After the failure of their mission, the brave knights of murder returned to their respective houses to find a demon waiting on them. At Tom's apartment, it was Mul who waited outside for Tom and Mort to get home. Tom drove the rental car he stole into the tiny parking lot and got out of the car in bewilderment. He felt very threatened by a mysterious masked killer knowing his name and glaring him down with a weapon...

"Good night" Mul greeted. "How are you guys?"

"Not well, it seems" Mort said. "Young Thomas has been feeling...paranoid since the encounter we had."

"Yes" Mul noted. "The higher-ups, so to speak, have already found out. Who was the other killer?"

"Tom seems to have an idea" Mort said. "He's been muttering about it since he heard that killer say his name. He's calling him Jormungandr, apparently."

"Ah" Mul grunted. "Yes, we have heard of him, although only a little. He's one of those odd cases who's file we don't have on record."

"File?" Mort asked.

"Of sins" Mul said. "Most humans have some sort of record of their sins in case they get sent down to Hell so we can adequately punish them."

"Huh" Mort grunted. He was apathetic to the inner workings of the world now, after what Mul had told hi about how existence can be instantly reset at any time. Nothing else was as jarring anymore, not even a failure like that. "I'll talk to him about it."

"Actually, I may as well" Mul said. "You see, I'm supposed to monitor you two for the time being until you get another target. My superiors are talking sweeps-style crap now, man. One kill apiece, instant elimination shit."

"That should be fine" Mort said. "I'm sure we can all operate independently for a single target. Tom and I will continue our partnership for now, surely, but the other's will do much better on their own."

"Let's hope so" Mul said. "Anyway, it's getting stupid out here. The 'gangs' of tweens and twinks are coming out. Let's head inside."

"Fine idea" Mort agreed. They walked and floated respectively toward the stairs and found the door at the top slightly ajar. Tom was still shaken and could not bother to shut it the whole way as he had shuffled in earlier. "After you" Mort offered.

"Thank you" Mul said with a bow. He opened the door, turned on the light, and was suddenly exposed to a barrage of automatic-rifle fire. Tom darted around the corner and unplugged his trap, seeing the many holes that swirled shut on his ghostly friend a moment too late.

"Sorry" Mort said, "but I knew that was coming."

"I'm really sorry, Mul" Tom said. He ran over and turned off the lights, then walked back and reconnected his trap. "I'm being stupid, I know..."

"Oh no, it's fine" Mul said. "The important thing is you guys were nice about it being an accident. And that's all it really was. Now, let's get down to business..."

"Mul" Tom said seriously. In the darkness his demeanor was obvious, and Mul braced himself for the obvious question that was coming. "Can we kill Jormungandr?"

"No" Mul answered.

"Fuck you" Tom snapped back. "I don't know why but that jerk's got it out for me and I won't have it! I'm a killer that was recruited by supreme, divine forces and he's just a random jackass that steals people's tags! I trump him easily!"

"_You_ can't get assigned to kill him" Mul said, motioning to Mort and Tom, "but I can make sure _you_ do" he now said, pointing only to Tom. "The next assignment may indeed be...a solo mission!" And Tom, who had played multi-player games most of his life, reacted in an unexpected way. He took out his Uzi, placed it in his mouth and cocked it with a crooked smile of fangs.

"Alriiiiight!" he growled. Mort shut the door behind him with a proud nod at his friend, finally showing his true killing colors...

* * *

At Yvonne's, instead of one of her murderous Succubus representatives, a mysterious little girl wearing bizarre and creepy raggedy-Anne apparel. Yvonne was most disgusted by how similarly they were both dressed, although Yvonne's was more provocative and adult in its design.

"Who the fucks are you?" Yvonne demanded.

"I'm a sweet little genocidal maniac!" the doll-girl cooed. "I'm here to tell you what your next target will be, since you couldn't get this one."

"It's not my damn fault" Yvonne protested. "That pervert Tom got there before me, he should have gotten that kill!"

"That's not the pointy-wointy" the doll said in its sickeningly sweet voice. "You're going to do this one alone!"

"Good" Yvonne huffed. "The less competition the more chance I'll get to really shine."

"But there's an important catch!" the doll added, skipping around. "If you don't get your kill, you'll automatically lose your right to live and be forced into Stasis Shock until the next target comes up!"

"What's Stasis Shock?" Yvonne asked.

"It's horrific!" the doll gleefully answered, grinning a smile of green daggers. "Trust me, you don't want to know!"

"Fair enough" Yvonne huffed. "Who will I be killing then?"

"There's going to be a fashion show in a few days" the doll said. "Your target is one of the models. We can't tell you which one, so you'll just have to find out yourself."

"Then why bother coming all the way here?" Yvonne snarled. "If you're just going to dangle loose ends and useless information in front of me, send a letter so I can tear it up!"

"Silly girly!" the doll giggled. "I needed to see your reaction for myself. I'm just a dolly, and I don't have human emotions anymore. All I can do is be sweet and cheerful, but seeing anger and loathing make me superdy-duper happy!"

"...okay?" Yvonne responded. "Well, if you're done, please get the fuck out of my house and let me prepare. I'll find this fashion show, crash it, and kill everyone if need be."

_But is that entirely wise?_ Beelzebub asked.

"Okie-dokie then" the doll chipperly cheered, "Bye-bye!" In a flicker of hellish flames she left for her home realm, and Yvonne was alone to talk with her companion again.

_She may in fact be testing you even more_ it warned. _You can't expect these demons and dark beings to be truthful with you out of honor and compassion. These fiends, form what I've read and researched in my spare time, are villainous and absolutely uncourteous. _

"Well, who cares" Yvonne said, slipping off her stocking and boots. "This means I'll finally get in league with everyone else! I haven't gotten the proper credit for anything yet, save that annoying clown that we all killed together. Since then, however, I've only assisted on killing the spider-woman and got knocked out by the old man's traps. Now I missed a kill entirely! It's becoming aggravating."

_I can understand your worry_ Beelzebub said empathetically. _However, this assignment should not be too difficult for you to handle, yes? Entering a fashion show will be easy enough, and I can certainly find that demon for you._

"But of course" Yvonne said with a laugh. "They still can't acknowledge you, so I'm still off the hook! Oh, and don't worry. Once I win I'm sure to get a call or another personal message, then I'll set you up a meeting with the Devil. I haven't forgotten about that."

_I know you haven't _Beelzebub said. _I can read your mind, you know, and having 'this disgusting bug' on your head is a constant bother to you, isn't it?_

"Oh, darling..." Yvonne chuckled, struggling for words, "I meant that in the good way!"

_Of course_ Beelzebub replied. Yvonne redressed in her silken gowns and retired to bed for the night while Beelzebub returned to his true form and locked the door to guard her. The enigmatic cosmic explorer and the princess plotted during the night for their next great move...

* * *

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the city, a gang of graffiti artists hit the streets with their arsenal of colored cans in bags and pockets.

"Okay rollers" the apparent leader said on his skates, "stick to your sectors. Tonight, we hit the main upstate, the main downstate, and the park!"

"Hell yeah!" another gang member said. "By morning the whole city's gonna be sprayed with our shit!"

"Let's all spread out" the leader called again. "Remember, our guns ain't loaded, so just use them for intimidation. We don't want any serious shit to go down tonight. We're just painting."

"Hell yeah!" the rest shouted. Down the sidewalk and roads they roared, on wheeled transport of all kind. Skateboards, roller skates, scooters and even the odd luge-board thundered through the night. They sprayed their signs in red and blue quickly on every wall they could, overwriting the sings of others, and covered great lengths of ground. They stealthily avoided the people still in the streets for a fear of unnecessary confrontation and tagged what alleys of worth they found.

"This'll be easy" one excited youth said. He rushed over on skates to the scenic bridge in the park, eyeing it down from afar as a very good spot to spray-paint on. It was his, he knew, until he saw someone else painting on the underside of the bridge. The youth skated slowly to a stop and hid in the bushes to watch from a distance, particularly afraid of what a man would be doing out this late with a brush and pastel of colors. "What the fook? Is this guy for real?...wait a sec, I have a gun! It isn't loaded, but even a crazy person will run if they see a gun." So he quietly skated over with his gun out and pointed it up at the non-hostile man painting.

"Yes?" the man droned.

"You best get out of here, man" the boy warned. "This is Roller territory, and I'm marking it!"

"Go ahead" the painting man said. That side of the bridge is still blank, aside from a few obscenities that were drawn on it before I got here. Use that side. I only need this side."

"Well, I need the whole thing!" the boy demanded. The man painting turned around, eyes heavy with insomnia and murderous coolness, and cracked a smile at the shivering kid.

"You really plan on marking the whole thing with just two cans of paint?" he asked. The youth though for a second, then decided that if this man wasn't already trying to fight him, a fight wouldn't be needed.

"No..." the kid admitted, "I guess I don't."

"Good answer" the painter said. "Pull up a wall and exert your force upon it. Painting is always happier with company." The kid nodded, retrieved the spray cans from his satchel and marked the blue backdrop he made with the bubble-texted 'Rollaz' in red. His job done for now, he placed his cans back in his bag and proceeded to the next wall he was scheduled to hit.

"What exactly are you painting, man?" the kid asked. The painter moved to the side and let the kid look. It was lacking an immediate explanation, so horrible and fear-invoking it appeared.

"Just some things I saw one time" the painter mused, continued to paint on the side, "in a vision I had. Just...some madness."

"It...it's great" the kid praised. "Thanks for showing me."

"Yeah" the painter sighed. "You should go now." And so the kid left. The overwhelming sense of dread he felt with his back to the stranger grew ever larger as he stayed and now left him as he sped away. The painter stayed, painting all night and into the morning to artistically portray his...vision.

"That's odd" Nny said, stowing away his supplies and heading off. "Now that I look at it, I think it's great too. It's almost like I didn't paint it...hmm." And so Nny left his painting, proud of his work, for the city to see. It was a hill, upon which was an empty throne carved form a jagged and evil tree. Six demonic figures stood three on each side of the tree. On the left was the white-eyed enigma, the curly-horned terror and the towering beast with sharp rows of white fangs. On the right was the tall and muscular man, the busty woman and the short kid with two eyes made uneven from each other. And at the base of the hill was the mangled remains of an arm belonging to some poor should caught in a havocked cross-fire of blood and death.

Six statues of inhumanity on a dead hill, screaming skulls for clouds and blood for rain. Only Nny could envision such a gruesome scene for the Throne of the King of Killers...


	36. Start Scenarios 1 and 2

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

As the now rickety rental car rolled up to the abandoned and barricaded cathedral far outside the town, a cloud of black thunder came rolling over the hills. The surrounding, serene countryside was interrupted only by the barbed-wire fencing around the stone and cement blockades in front of the church that was carved so cleverly out of the surrounding black-tree woods.

Mort stepped out of the car, shovel tight in hand and an unnecessary revolver tucked in his belt. "Wish me luck, Thomas" he said.

"Sure thing, pal" Tom said. "Make sure you use that gun, okay? It was my dad's."

"Was?" Mort repeated. "Your parents aren't dead. I've talked to them."

"It was his before I stole it" Tom admitted. "You wish me luck too, dude. I might need it."

"Godspeed, Thomas" Mort said. Tom rolled up the window and drove away with Mul's cloak billowing out the back of the car.

"Who's he after?" Tom asked Mul, watching Mort's solemn approach of the ominous church.

"A crazed Catholic priest who now is know as 'the Ripper'" Mul explained. "He is more of a favor that heaven has asked our lord to dispose of and he obliged under some circumstances. Namely that would be allowed to track down your target, this mysterious killer we know nothing about.

"Jormungandr" Tom lowed. "I looked it up on WikiPedia. He takes his name from some giant Norse snake that holds the world together. I think it's just a 'my dick's this big' kinda stunt, not anything too symbolic. Then again, I could be wrong."

"What do you mean?" Mul asked.

"A killer's name represents them" Tom explained. "I haven't really established myself as a killer, but Mort has. He's 'the Mortician', one who is an expert as funerals and other matters regarding the dead. I'm Thomas Quindale, naturally athletic nerd. I can't really go around with the name 'the Gamer' and expect to be feared, y'know?"

"Good point" Mul said. "Anyway, this guy you're after isn't a normal human. He was a cloned super-soldier in a Cold War program that was recently aborted. Turns out he went back to the lab he was born in and destroyed it, which the Government branch covered up with the secret news of abortion since the Cold War is obviously over."

"Sounds like a game plot" Tom said. "That's good. It'll help me focus. So I have to stop the crazed super-soldier with a funny name from rampaging and causing a political scandal or something?"

"No" Mul answered, "he actually got all his legitimate revenge on the orchestrator's of the operation that birthed him and several others. Now he just wants to kill you, for reasons even Heaven can't fathom yet."

"Sweet" Tom said. He was getting anxious and excited, as he moved in his seat and started speeding through the forest path to the main road. "So I'm like a destined one? I won some sort of destiny lottery or something?"

"That's what it amounts to" Mul said. "Frankly this incident is unavoidable. You would have to fight him eventually, King of Killers or no, so it may as well be now to establish some dominance among the secret world of assassins."

"Hell yeah" Tom growled. "I'm loving this game now! YEAH!" Mul strapped his seatbelt in with the dread of an over-excited, homicidal young man being behind the wheel of a nearly broken car. Tom ignored all the road signs he could and bolted down the highway towards his destined meeting place at the edge of the city...

* * *

Mort, meanwhile, walked warily through a narrow opening in the side of the convent base. It was a spacious, almost ominously so, lobby with hanging paintings of infinitely Christian depictions. A huge marble statue of the decapitated virgin Mary stood in the center of the large room like an obelisk. The many paintings of Jesus and the Apostles, which this church was previously famous for carrying, were torn and crudely marked in long-dried blood. They were given clownish make-overs with extended and sophomoric attempts at swastikas on their foreheads. Mort drew up his hood and clicked on his goggles, as the rolling clouds were beginning to cut out the light.

"May God have mercy on your souls" Mort lowed softly, "because I sure as shit will not! Defacing these images insults the millions of people who love them. I can't let anyone blatantly laugh in the face of someone's beloved leaders..." Mort drew his shovel out and held it in both hands with vindictive anger. Little did he know just how well occupied this place was. From the black shadows, cultists lurked about with silent knives and metal claws which they planned to use to rip Mort's dark skin from his fine muscular structure.

"I should keep Tom's revolver in mind for now" Mort told himself. "It may not work on a demon, but if he has grunts it will definitely slow them down. If not, I can always just clip off his limbs to down him." Mort proceeded into one of the side rooms, filled with desks and old, broken computer desktops that was most likely a sort of office area for the people who worked on the financial situation at the church. In the darkness Mort could hear some movement. He closed and locked the door behind him, finding it initially odd that there was an unbroken door leading to such an unimportant area, and started forward slowly.

_This is the tension part _Mort told himself. _It's most likely going to be like a movie. The enemy has limited resources and I limited stamina. I must conserve myself, especially my gun, until something absolutely necessary comes up. I need to pace myself. As Thomas would observe, this is just like a video game. I just wish now that I were better at these type of games..._ Suddenly the clacking of metal parts entered the room from some unknown corner. Mort lowered his goggles and clicked them on. He could see in greens and blacks again, unbeknownst to his enemy, and saw the carefully sneaking figure coming at him down the row of desks. Initially, Mort ignored the threat and continued faking blindness around the room.

"Where are you...?" Mort growled. He saw the man, wearing a tattered cloak and gauze wrappings all over with a hand-scythe and metal tassel, sneer quite evilly and continue silently ahead. Mort kept his shoulders low and his tension high as he very warily approached the enemy. He saw his enemy reel up with a toothy grin, prepare a devastating chop, and Mort bashed the little man's jaw apart from his skull with one solid blow. His enemy out of commission, Mort stomped over and made an example of his stunned lamb.

"Let me teach you what happens when the tenants of religion are destroyed" Mort growled. He kicked the man onto his stomach, stabbed his neck with the spade of his shovel and speared it with his foot clear into the wooden floor. "With no mercy, there is no regret in overkill. And to anyone who can hear this, I personally do not believe in the Christ God! I know that the winds of destiny blow strongly at my back! I cannot condone, however, this blatant spitting in the face of another's faith! For that alone I will make sure you pay, sacrilegious bitch!" In response to Mort's rant the distant sound of chainsaws revving was heard, followed by the mad cackling that ran over them. A lump passed through Mort's throat.

"Oh shit" Mort mumbled. "I never planned on chainsaws. I fucking hate those things!" In the far distant area where these heathen monsters wielding tools of destruction lurked, even more lesser-armed villains rushed forth to intercept and destroy their intruder. The Account of the Mad Preacher and his Congregation starts here...

* * *

In the descending twilight of the evening, Devi found herself in a most unlikely place.

"Shit, Tenna" she groaned. "Why did you drag me to a fucking fashion show?"

"Why not?" Tenna chirped. "You were just sulking around all day, reading weird books and making up fake math theories. You need to see the world, or at least go out and make fun of it to the face. Come on! I bet you'll say the word 'anorexia' at least twenty times by the end of the show!" Devi was unmoved by the concept but flattered by the idea of her friend thinking this much of her.

"Alright" Devi finally said. "We'll stay for a bit and make fun of skinny girls. Then we'll go home."

"And?" Tenna added.

"And..." Devi added in defeat, "we'll stop at 'Taco Hell' on the way." Tenna nearly hugged her, but the show was starting and she didn't want to miss out any of the great fun-making she would do. Backstage, Yvonne prepared herself while Beelzebub scanned the minds of every young lady to find one with the appropriate level of guilt or dread to warrant a coming murder. Then, he returned to Yvonne's side and crawled up through her dress onto her head.

_I believe I found her_ Beelzebub said.

_Excellent_ Yvonne thought at him. _Who is it? I want to end this promptly and get back._

_It is the girl wearing all blue_ Beelzebub said. Yvonne looked in her mirror as she smooched her lipstick to her lips and spotted her at last. She looked quite depressed, slumping in her chair with her long, silky wig and blue corset over a perfectly flat silken skirt and blue heels. Her theme was either sadness or...blue. Yvonne couldn't bother to figure out which one. Instead, she tried to find some way to measure what her power was and find a weakness before the fight actually happened.

_Could you figure anything else out from touching her?_ Yvonne asked.

_Only that she isn't entirely human_ Beelzebub responded. _She has a large hint of demonic energy, much like the previous target that I tried to navigate you to. She is definitely the target. What her powers may be, I am not sure._

_Shit_ Yvonne metnally cursed.

"Miss Daisy?" a call girl called from the room door. Yvonne darted her head around and raised her hand. "You're first. Dead Phreak, Asia and Sour Blossom are on deck." As Yvonne moved out for the walkway she saw the other three girls get up and caught a quick glance of her target as she left. She saw, in the mirror, the true symbol of her demonic representation. She frowned openly into her face, but in the mirror there was no face. Just contorted and severly twisted skin covering her face.

_This should be easy_ Yvonne told herself. Little did she know that it would not and would never be easy for her...The Account of the Sobbing Ghost is begun.


	37. Begin Stories C & D

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Sam's assignment was simple: kill a sociologist gone mad. A man with no proper means of self defense in the face of overwhelming, hellish power aside form a hiding place that even demons could not find. He had previously appealed to the state board of sociological research to conduct experiments that were since deemed 'inhumanly immoral and unethical in unprecedented extremes'. Samuel rode in a limousine to the closest point the demons that employed him could find to this target's whereabouts. A an abandoned rural town's mayoral district. All the quasi-important political structures of this never renovated village stood in a state of disgusting disrepair. Everything everywhere was era early 1800s, with the exception of poorly maintained electric wires and cable boxes.

"For a man like me" Sam said, loading his magnificent gun, "this is just a step away from Hell."

"Best of luck" Remsius of Hell said from the driver seat. Sam stepped out into the streets and the car vanished in a puff of ashen dust to the netherworld. His only intel was that his target was deranged, and in an area as spacious and strewn with cover as this, he could be waiting anywhere with an evil ambush plotted.

"This won't be easy" Sam said. "Especially if he's employed some extra help. I'd better switch guns until I find him." So, to conserve the scarce ammo he had, Sam drew out a neatly polished, wood-finished automatic rifle. He made sure it was loaded, cocked it, and set out to town slowly. Unknown to the bespectacled anti-hero, there were indeed sinister forces stalking about. Within the rotted walls and shady corners of the narrow alleys and street-corner lamps were wireless hidden cameras. Elsewhere in the rustic town sat the target, hidden by shadows, as he leaned back in his chair and grinned. An emaciated hand reached over from his side and pushed a button on the desk that sat before the myriad screens.

"Let the game begin" the target said on the border of manic laughter... Suddenly the streets were alive and blazing with loud mechanical roars and flashing lights. Sam didn't miss a step in his gait and didn't let the noise and flickering lights bother him. He kept himself constantly aware of gun sounds and boots marching, just in case.

_Just come out_ Sam tiredly demanded in his head. _If you have a spec of human logic, come out and end this quickly._ As expected, the marching of multiple boots was soon heard, and Sam attempted to find refuge behind a broken old jalopy car. Almost immediately, bullets started firing across the square. Judging by the sounds and the trajectory, Samuel made his assumption and sprang up to fire rounds quickly. Aiming with the butt of the gun against his shoulder, Sam shot one mercenary through the useless Kevlar mask and the bullet exited through the base of his skull, severing his spinal cord and brain. Then, Sam ducked back.

One dead, at least four left.

"Send the vultures" the mysterious target commanded. Another emaciated hand, attached to an unseen body in the blackness of his supposed lair, pressed a button carelessly wired to a machine. Now an air-raid siren blared and the mercenaries retreated. Sam assumed the worst and equipped his trademark gun again, expecting demons or mad clinic cases with godly reflexes and annoying twitching habits to come out of the windows and sewers. However, he saw nothing but circling shadows at his feet.

"What now?" Sam asked, looking up. Very quickly the sky above him was being covered by birds. These birds were very abnormal, however, in that they had all been hideously mutated to grow teeth and have an unquenchable blood thirst. Sam assumed such as the entire flock of birds, sized from sparrow to mallard, came diving straight at him with a gore-filled screech. One shot and the cloud dissolved into messy rain, but the sky continued to fill and spiral ominously.

"Shit" Sam cursed. "I need to move!" And so he did. Sam went sprinting down the street, seeing hordes of maniacal birds flying at him from nearly all sides. "Cover, cover" Sam muttered. "Where's some cover!?" He looked to his left and right, neglecting to pay mind to his front and back where the vicious birds were quickly storming in. Finally, an opening! An unbarred, glass window that led to an unknown indoor area. Everything else was fast sealed or boarded up from the inside, so Sam made the hasty decision and jumped to his right, through the window. He landed on his back so he could point at the window, but the birds only flocked around in confusion, having apparently lost track of Sam.

"The intellect of an animal is surprising" a Vincent Price-esque voice echoed throughout the various speakers of town, "isn't it sir?"

"Who the hell...?" Sam asked.

"I am Von Horn Gott" the voice introduced, "an award winning psychiatrist and sociological researcher. I have spent a good lifetime's worth of work these past five years researching and perfecting the finer arts of the human and inhuman subconscious, and thanks to the involuntary donation from the greater powers that be I was able to cure the sickening disease that clouds men's minds known as 'madness'. Now I wish to purge the entire world of its mad attachments so the human race can evolve to the next sociological step, from a loose group of unrelated societies to one wonderful hive of knowledge and collaborative effort!"

"A Utopia-crazed maniac" Sam uttered to himself. He checked his ammo, heard random guns blazing, and equipped his automatic once more. "Seems fairly simple."

"Kill him, my pets!" Von Horn commanded. "Kill him so we may spread my gift to the WORLD!"

"Be more cliche'd why don't you?" Sam growled. The Account of the Sociopathic Sociologist is afoot!

* * *

The target is an unknown assassin whose name is his only trademark on record. Jormungandr, the World Serpent. Why this name, no one seems to know. Its historical connotations suggest that he keeps things together, a sort of living belt that ties the ends of the world in a knot to keep it from falling apart. However, there is the darker side to that title, a name that implies total inhumanity, a monster. This is Tom's target.

Tom is ecstatic about it. Fate itself has arranged for these two to fight, and Tom was more than ready to find his destiny.

"Here it is" Mul said. Tom stopped at the boundaries to a city that was between places. He drove past the exits on the freeway when dropping off Mort beforehand. It was roughly a two-and-a-half hour commute from his hometown to here. This city seemed much more lively and, oddly, colorful than his own. Even the lights in the concrete and steel skyline were a calm and brilliant hue of blue. "Be safe out there, Tom."

"No problem" Tom said. Mul exited the car and Tom drove off, into the city. Mul had no comment for the occasion. He just stood silently watching before vanishing back to his given place. "He's easy enough to spot in a crowd" Tom noted. "I just need some way of drawing him out..." As Tom drove down the city streets, he noticed just how luminescent they were up close compared to the streets of his home. His vision was filled with the blurs of fast-moving lights and the sounds of a world caught fire with excitement. Despite how empty the roads seemed, the sidewalks and strips of shopping teemed with live, even in the approaching evening light. Signs and billboards of blazing blue and green made the sky and the colorful displays of shop windows made up the ground of this place.

"This is a nice fucking city!" Tom said, summarizing his whole passage of though as quickly as he could. "Wow! It's like Tokyo or something!" He continued driving through the streets, observing the rushing masses as they enjoyed themselves in the sensory-overload environment. Some more cars came and went, either loosing Tom or getting lost by him, until Tom had driven enough to lose the entire city's crowd. He was now in a different part of town where men and women in jackets with tattoos on every visible part of their flesh were loitering freely on the corners and in front of shops.

"Gang territory" Tom told himself. "And me in a shit-stained rust-colored piece of dookie like this. They'll either think I'm an idiot or a rival gang member. For once, I hope it's idiot." Suddenly, a red light. In the four lane one-way street, two cars pulled up on either side of Tom's. He looked from one car to another and saw two extremely contrasting people in each. The car on his left had people with piercings and tattoos like those in the street. The car on his right had men and women with their heads shaved and their skin virtually bleached.

"Shit" Tom cursed. "Gang wars. I better just keep my head down and ignore these guys. They can fight it out on their own." The cars revved engines at each other. The ones on the street started getting curious as to the other car's intentions, and once the light turned green all three cars went peeling out with loud screeches. Tom was caught in the middle of a firefight, and all by accident despite his rather obvious rush. The cars sped as fast as possible down the street, ignoring red lights and green lights in favor of shooting at each other. The bald ones had a girl leaning out of the window with an AK-47 while the punk gang had two guys with pistols, one out the back window and another out the sun-roof.

"Cock!" Tom shouted ,keeping his head down. "Why did my instincts tell me to go at green!? I should know better than that!" Suddenly, another car in front of the three veered off the road and ran into a shop. They were now blazing on a two-way street and taking up three of the four lanes. The other cars had to either park or pray that they didn't die as they swerved away. "This can't be good for my karma" Tom said. As his eyes were kept forward something jumped into the periphery of his vision. It was an intangible figure wrapped in a gray suit with a black scarf, brandishing a katana that plunged deep through the roof of the car on the right, killing the driver. With a glower, Tom turned and just saw the thing leap away as the other car swerved dangerously off the road. Before Tom could look back, the same thing happened, and he instinctively started steering to and fro before the same happened to him.

_Take a left!_ Tom's unconscious brain screamed. He did, piled through a load of civilians, and wound up blacking out for a bit. When he came to, he saw the billowing scarf of the curious figure from before standing a good distance away amidst some burning rubble.

"I've been waiting for you Thomas Quindale" the growling, evil voice said. Tom immediately shot up and drew out his uzi with both hands, aiming from the hip at his target. "At last, I will be able to rest!" The Account of the Killstealer now begins as well!


	38. Mort v Gore & Yvonne v LeVieca

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Continuing on, here marches Mort, a man on a mission against overwhelming odds. He is kept at wits end as the echoes of distant yet constantly reminding chainsaw are heard wherever he goes. Minions leap out from every corner they can fit into and just barely lurk outside his vision. Mort stumbled through the darkness over objects obscured by the irradiate light of his goggles and the clashing textures on the walls. Ruined portraits and vigils lie everywhere in this desecrated cathedral. The Mad Preacher and his Congregation are on the attack of the Mortician.

"Come on!" Mort shouted. He grabbed a scrawny minion by the throat, threw him to the ground and squeezed until he heard a crack. Then he stomped hard on the man's face and twisted while another one charge him with bladed hands. Mort wound up his shovel like bat and took a nasty, jaw-breaking swing that sent the man tumbling away. Now, with a scream and a gas-fueled roar, came one of the apparitions Mort dreaded the most. Coming from another adjoining room by tearing a hole through the wall was a crazed man in priest's robes wearing a bloody sack over his head with holes for his bulging eyes. He wielded a chainsaw.

"Fuck" Mort cursed. He swallowed his fear, kicked away the corpse he stood on and prepared his polearm for battle. The chainsaw man screamed incoherently, pumped his arms above his head with chainsaw wielded to intimidate, then lurched quickly forward with his head madly twitching. Mort didn't want him to get to close or to be able to swing that deadly weapon, so his first intention was to disable him by jabbing at his arm. He made a quick thrust and the man swung at his shovel. Mort backed away and repeated into the other arm which the man had more trouble reaching. Then Mort pumped his shovel forward, stopping it far short of his enemy's reach, and let his swing in vain. Then he made a hack at his shoulder and disabled the arm that held the main handle of the weapon.

"You're fucked" Mort growled. He raised his shovel up, took a powerful step forward and smashed it square onto the man's head. He stumbled in a daze to the floor. Mort decided to use force against him, took his own chainsaw, and hacked his head from his body. Then, in a fit of uncouth rage, he started chopping randomly at the corpse to get it into as many pieces as possible. His trench coat was splattered with blood and his pants from the shins down were soaked. "RAAAAHHH!!!" Mort bellowed. "Come on! Any of you fucking fuckers wanna get fucked!? I'm right fuckin' here!"

"Quit swearing!" a random minion shouted in an elitist voice.

"You're right" Mort said, "I apologize. That was a bit much." The minion in question came skittering across the wide floor to stab at Mort's seemingly unguarded back, but got a cruel face-full of metal shovel. He dropped to the ground and Mort curb-stomped him, separating his spinal cord form his brain stem and thus killing him instantly. "Still, this is getting annoying. I can still hear what sounds like plenty of chainsaws deeper within, and I know that destiny is pushing me in that direction. I'm reluctant to go, but I must." So Mort continued to follow the winds that guided him. They took him up the stair where two more villains were waiting for him. He silence one with a spade into and through the mouth, slicing his head off. The other one charged and nearly tackled Mort, but the larger black man simply picked him up and tossed him off the wall far across the room and into a metal pole below. His skull bled and the body groaned in its weak death throes while Mort moved on.

"I wonder" Mort asked himself, "what kind of fiend awaits me at the end of this maze. Moreover, I wonder what sins this man has committed that would send Heaven and Hell against him with such fierce force besides the obvious. Hell would more than tolerate some simplistic murders and brainwashing schemes, I'm sure."

"The world weeps for the damned" a mysterious voice said. Mort looked in its direction, unaware at the present of his surroundings. The winds of fate had brought him to the central balcony and stopped at the edge of the railing. A floor and a half below was a near infinite arrangement of pews that led up to a huge and magnificent ruined alter and cross. Atop that cross, standing in the carved hole in the wall, was a man dressed all in white from toe to six-foot-something head. Mort couldn't help but characterize his garb with that of a Klu Klux Klan member, for whatever reason. "I am the pastor here, John Gore, or as you know me out in the filthy world 'the Ripper!"

"Nice to meet you at last" Mort said. He quickly sheathed his shovel and pulled out his gun in the same, fluid motion. "Now, farewell."

"I wouldn't do that if I were you" John protested. "You see, this church is in fact the only means of support for a new and amazing movement. If I, its sole leader, were to die, the whole world would potentially go to hell and back!"

"At least it will come back then" Mort said. He fired a shot, just one, at his target. For all he knew, it hit and the Ripper was sent back while his two minions with chainsaws revved them up and breached the doors on either side of Mort. He had few options now. "Shit" Mort cursed, deciding that as his first major decision. He sheathed his gun, took his shovel back out, and created a diversion for the maniac at his right. He dug into the floor behind him, dug out one of the chairs and tossed it to his right. Then, before the maniac realized what was happening, he stepped back to slice the chair without damaging himself.

_A second well bought!_ Mort told himself. He rushed full-force at the other one, unprepared for a battle, and speared him with his spade. With a nasty, gnashing twist and a kick, Mort took out a scoop that comprised nearly all of the man's small and large intestines. Then, he tossed them down over the railing,s causing a temporary immortal madness that his enemy wasted by rushing over to try and catch them in vain. Mort kicked him over the edge and sent him to his death. Then the other maniac made a horrific lunge and barely missed, forcing his saw into the bronze banister and creating a flash of sparks that blinded Mort for but a moment. He forced off his goggles for just a moment, and by the light of the dim but still active cross, he could see his attacker in all his horror.

"I think NOT!" Mort said, blocking the chainsaw with the metal of his shovel. Sparks flew in every direction, but none came close to Mort's skin. Still, he struggled to hold his own against the force of a destructive chainsaw until he felt a breeze at his chest. He glanced back and saw, still revved and ready, the saw of the other maniac he had just recently disposed. Thinking quick;y, he pulled out his gun and used it to fake with just a point. His enemy retreated with the chainsaw covering his head and upper back, which gave Mort enough time to sheathe both his shovel and the gun, pick up the chainsaw, and run up behind his enemy. "BANG!" Mort shouted. His enemy turned around, now aware of the folly he had committed, and got sawed straight in half down the middle. "YEAH!" Mort shouted, looking down at his bloody new...friend with delight.

* * *

"And that's the first line-up" the DJ/announcer of the fashion show declared. "We'll be back with some smoking babes in skimpy dresses after this important word form our corporate sponsor!" Then, a skinny man in a business suit mounted the stage and began reading from a slip of paper from is breast pocket. Devi and Tenna, however, were outside laughing themselves into madness at the hilarious jokes regarding the girls weight they came up with.

"Did you see that one?" Devi said between her laughter. "She looked like a spine from the ribs down!"

"Did you see the one in leather?" Tenna replied. "Her cheeks were imploded! She looked like a fish!"

"And the Botox one" Devi pointed out. "How pathetic is it that she had to inject it as the curtains were pulling up? And then her face afterwards?"

"She looked like she had diarrhea!" Tenna added. Both girls continued to laugh uproariously, unaware of the true complexities of being a fashion deva or of the sinister murder plot unraveling behind the curtain. Yvonne was de-prepping herself, removing makeup and prop clothing for her relatively normal, 80's style street clothes complete with pink leg warmers over black tights and a wide-collared shirt with a light pink paint stain on it. Her golden hair was in a perm now with Beelzebub hiding deep within on her scalp.

_I suggest you move_ Beelzebub instructed _before she goes on. Be aware, however, that she is onto you._

_I know that_ Yvonne said. _Then again, she seems quite paranoid of nearly everyone around her. I think she may be autistic or something._

_It's the fear of impending, unstoppable doom_ Beelzebub said. Yvonne started slowly approaching, planning a light pat on the shoulder to measure her reaction and physical skills, then she would wait it out until she could get alone with the weeping ghost girl to finish her. _She knows full well that her end is fast approaching. Just be on edge when you get close. Even at this distance, my immortal mind does not trust her._

_Shut the hell up_ Yvonne demanded. She finally let go of her fear and approached the girl. She looked in the mirror and saw that her face was still a disgusting mess of what it should be, but there was something else as well. In the far corner of the room, in a shaded nook behind a rack of clothes, Yvonne could spot another unfamiliar thing that she had not seen there before. It looked to be a mysterious figure sporting an all-concealing robe and two crescent shapes facing away from each other for a head with the portrait of a face within each. Then, panic ensued. For some odd reason, there was an explosion out front.

"Oh my gawd!" one of the showgirls shouted. Yvonne initially just ignored the chaos and kept her eyes on her target. Unfortunately, in the brief second she looked away out of curiosity, her target somehow disappeared.

"You're shitting me!" Yvonne screamed. The ghost girl was sprinting out of the back-stage entrance already and ran into the open street still all garbed up in her blue dress and leather.

"No!" she shouted in desperation.

"Hey!" Devi shouted from the street. "Hey, you're one of the models, aren't you?"

"What the hell happened?" Tenna asked as well.

"I don't know!" the girl cried with sadness. She then began just crying into her hands.

"Shit" Devi cursed. It looks like nothing goods going to come of you just staying in the open. That could have been a terrorist attack or some shit. Do you have somewhere to go?" The girl looked up with her face wet with tears and droll and shook her head. "You can come with us."

"Wait a sec, Devi" Tenna said, pulling her friend aside to whisper to her. "Doesnt this seem a little stupid? Like some ill-contrived anime plot or something?"

"You're right!" Devi whispered back. "It's like nearly every single anime ever written ever! Don't worry, I know how to test that theory." Devi turned back around and saw the poor girl was still openly weeping and biting her lip. "What's your name?"

"Angel LeVieca" she answered.

"That's a weird name" Tenna said. A sudden blast of bullets broke the group apart and Devi stumbled and fell away from the girl she tried to help. In her panic she felt her eyes sink back into her head and the cityscape suddenly flashed into the horrid dreamland wherein nothing but a single tree on a hill populated. After a flash or two the vision faded and Angel was long gone. Tenna was knocked out on a bus bench with drool coming form her mouth across the street.

"What the fuck just happened!?" Devi shouted.

* * *

_This is an unanticipated development_ Beelzebub pointed out. Yvonne was still shaken but standing after the horrific psychological attack. _She is able to freely manipulate the fluids in the brain to cause visual and auditory hallucinations based on the subconscious fears in one's mind. She can control your fear!_

"That's a stupid power!" Yvonne argued. "Still, I have no real fears to speak of. I can't even remember what she did! I must have just blacked out for a second!"

_Right_ Beelzebub agreed, although the images from the previous mission flashed just a moment before. Headless parents and siblings, all culminating to the final events of that night, but ending as she woke up. _Let's stop her. She isn't running very fast. Chase her!_

"Don't order me around!" Yvonne growled. She was now in pursuit of her target in the cold city night. Angel was heading for downtown...and the party crowds were just leaving...


	39. Sam v Gott & Tom v Jormungandr

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

In the abandoned town of madmen and animals, Sam fought for his life. It had been only a few proverbial 'rounds' with these repeating cycles and he had already discerned the pattern of his enemies attacks. When outside, he would be attacked by flocks of birds. When inside, he would be assaulted by nameless and faceless fucks with guns from across the street. When traveling into the open, the mercenaries would automatically retreat into some unseen nooks and cranny, acting blind to whatever happened and somehow disappearing from Sam's radar entirely. They were hiding from the ally-less mad birds. Conversely, when he went inside, a button or switch or level somewhere was activated that sent the birds back into the shadows to wait for Sam to stray outside again.

"This is bullshit" Sam said to himself. Currently he was holding out in a house wherein he killed several mercenaries and stole their guns. More mercenaries were converging from some unknown vantage points to take him out. They all operated on the same hive-minded purpose of route-finding to get Sam out of cover and were able to coordinate without communication audibly. It was marvelous to watch were it not so very deadly to stop paying attention to at the present. "I need to figure out how to get my target out in the open. I can't see any open spots in the streets!"

"Indeed, Mr. Killer" the enigmatic Von Horn Gott said through the malicious PA system. Sam leaned against a wall and peered out the window, watching dreadfully as the mercenaries moved away for cover. "This town was in fact the foundation for my present research. In the early dawn of the American West, everyone who had lived and loved in this town was suddenly gone the next morning, all of them packing for the great, untamed west. It was a trying time for the neighboring towns that had not emptied out, coming through the hollow streets and ghostly alleys. Then, nearly a century later in the late 1950s the government declared that this town would be reused and not forgotten for a wondrous new line of sociological experiments for use of psychological warfare!"

"I don't care, really" Sam said. Suddenly, he heard dogs barking fiercely somewhere far away in the town. That made him care. "So, dogs?" Sam asked, aware his target could hear him.

"Amazing creatures, aren't they?" Gott mused. "Dobermans are undoubtedly among the most instinctively violent of the domestic canines. They can rip and rend human flesh from bone in only a few rapid thrashings. They are lethal attack dogs. Imagine what can be done with proper training through brain-wave stimulation drugs!?"

"Brain-waves?" Sam repeated. "Was that the experiment? Manipulating human and animal behavior and observing the reactions?"

"It was much more profound than that" Gott admitted. "Initially, that was all they could do. However, as the generations of subjected animals and humans progressed ,a dynamic change took effect." Sam had to avert his attention now from the window of a bedroom to the hallway where a loud and alerted growling was heard. "You see, through stimulation in the brain, the DNA of all the beings subjected was altered. The project had long gone past the realm of psychology and boring dimensions of human/animal behavior. They created a short-cut through the eons of life and living!" Sam anticipated the nest event, a shadow appearing on the wall adjacent the oped door of the bedroom that sulked forward slowly.

"This project" Gott finished "surpassed God! It was a near instant jolt of evolutionary changes! They advanced the human species in only TWO YEARS!!!" Suddenly, the deformed and twisted face of what Sam assumed to be a Doberman dog peered around the corner. The brown skin was tight and taut that the bone nearly shone through it. It's eyes were all black and unwatching like a shark's eyes. It's gums and teeth were perpetually bared and sharper than any living creature of its particular genus, like knives grown in front of knives and even an abnormally long tongue that splintered into its own teeth, providing a non-threatening cushion of flesh in its mouth. It was easily the size of a grizzly bear, skin bald and patched with thin skin against enormous muscles.

"Oh, holy Krishna" Sam whispered. The dog suddenly snapped and began barking its demonic bark ans slobbering caustic foam all around. Same saw it attempt to stalk forward but lost itself in the hallway and wandered away and down a set of stairs. "What the fuck just happened there?"

"I have opened my doors, young man" Gott called. "The judicial building across the street form the church is where I and my greater subjects dwell currently. Please, feel free to visit if you can...in this lifetime. Mm-hmm, hmm-ha! Hm, hahahahahaha!!!!"

"That's a stupid-damn laugh" Sam said. He stood up, adjusted his glasses, and slowly walked out of the room. "Still, I need to figure out the mechanics of these things if I want to survive long enough to kill that freak. They're obviously stronger and smarter than Doberman's normally are, but they must have some kind of sensory deficiency of some kind. Possibly, they react based on motion rather than heat or something else as complex yet inconvenient for me? Or...maybe...shit." Sam retreated back into the room and closed the door. "They're setting a trap, obviously." Sam looked outside to confirm his theory. Three giant dogs were circling around below the window, waiting for him. The rest, he assumed were still inside and waiting at any possible ambush-worthy corner for him to come by.

"I have two options" Sam told himself. "Either A: Sprint through the traps hoping I spring them just a second too soon and get away, or B: use my big gun and kill everything in one shot." The answer was obvious. He broke the window, aimed his sacred weapon down so he got all three behemoths at once, and fired. Three skulls were shattered into bloody fountains in one shot, and their naturally muscle-bound bodies made for excellent cushions. Once outside, he quickly ran to close the door and lock the other dogs in. Then, of course, came the humming buzz caused by the flock of voracious carnivore birds. Sam began sprinting through the open street, looking for cover anywhere, but he also couldn't shake the odd feeling that he was being pursued very actively and intently from behind. The dogs from the house had already broken down the door with a pounce and were hot on his heels.

"Shit, shit shit shit SHIT!" Sam shouted, breaking into a full sweat and sprint. He found a metal-barred door on his left and dived into it desperately. He locked the door behind him and soon after heard the rampant banging of the dogs against the metal door. He was safe...for now.

* * *

A masked face and body, the spirit of death and destined opponent Jormungandr stood somewhat triumphantly atop a burning pile of metal wreckage. He was glared at by Thomas Quindale, a man who was born under the start that wanted Jormungandr dead.

Thomas ran forward, aiming from the hip with his gun, and started spraying bullets quite randomly at his target. Jormungandr was too nimble and agile for Tom's weapon to do any good. Each bullet missed the mark by more than a yard, and Jormungandr continued moving even after the gun clicked on empty. Tom took a drastic step and drew out his authentic, super-sharp Japanese sword. He swung down hard and hit metal. Jormungandr was facing away from Tom with one hand stretched over and behind his head with three nastily angular metal claws extending out to catch the blade and the other in front of his face in a ninja-esque finger pose.

"It is futile" Jormungandr said. He swung his arm forward and disarmed Tom instantly. Now defenseless, Tom started backing up while Jormungandr came sprinting at him with his clawed hand drawn back for a swipe. "I have superior training."

"Like fuck you do!" Tom said. Tom was already very well aware of his surroundings and backed up right into a pile of rubble. He started climbing the uneven surface almost by intuition and found a metal pipe sticking from the mound just a bit. He grabbed it and made a swing that forced Jormungandr to backflip away. Tom jumped down and swung the pipe again, and Jormungandr spun away on his toes like he was weightless against the force of the bat. Tom ignored it and swung again, but this time something bizarre occurred. Jormungandr dodged and twisted away like a demented snake-skin caught in a breeze. His arms and legs twisted around with total disregard for regular physiology and he was soon standing normally and calmly with his hands folded behind his back across the room.

"What kind of fucking freak are you!?" Tom shouted.

"I am Jormungandr" Jormungandr said. "I am the pinnacle of genetic training and pre-creationism. I can also juggle and know over 30 different omelet recipes."

"What...?" Tom dumbly said. "Whatever, you're about to be dead! Try working that into your title!"

"Oh no, Thomas" Jormungandr said. "I will not die today." Tom charged and tossed the pipe like a javelin. Jormungandr's mid-section moved apart from the rest of his body, like a snake's body would, and snapped back just the same like rubber. "If anyone, you will die." Jormungandr took a more serious, assassin-worthy pose with his legs spread far apart and both mechanical gauntlets clawed and ready, arms crossed in front of his chest. He glared up with one very evil eye at Tom, who had worked his way back to his katana and was charging again.

"AaaaaahhhHHHHHAAA!" Tom shouted. Jormungandr prepared for the flurry of attacks to come. Tom started wildly but stylishly sweeping with the sword from left to right, throwing in stabs and occasional helm-splitting strikes to throw his opponent off. Jormungandr blocked with his angled gauntlet blades and strafed around whenever the opportunity came to get inside Tom's guard. Video games had sharpened young Tom's mind over the years, and he was able to successfully read Jormungandr's moves as he did them. He operated at a godly level of reaction that Jormungandr could only laugh at with a sense of lilting defeatism.

"You're very good with that weapon" Jormungandr complimented, "but just how good are you at killing? Am I wrong in assuming that you have yet to properly hunt and slay your own prey?"

"Like shit!" Tom answered. "I killed that old man when I found out about you!"

"Or did you?" Jormungandr added. He deflected Tom and jumped up to the ceiling, far from Tom's reach. "Did he not asked for a swift, merciful death? Does a gazelle offer itself to a lion when it knows it is being hunted? Do the noobies online lay down their controllers and let you win when you have shown them your supposed skill!?"

"Shut up, stalker freak!" Tom shouted. "Get the hell down here so I can kill you!"

"No" Jormungandr dejected. "That sounds unpleasant. Besides, you cannot possibly kill me. Not only am I much more flexible and naturally powerful than you, you cannot surprise me! I know everything I need to know about you, Thomas, from you're supposed style to the weapons learned through DVDs and even how many pornos you own!"

"I don't own porn" Tom said. "It's free on the Internet. Besides, I doubt you can know everything about me, jackass!"

"I don't doubt it" Jormungandr said. He hopped down and made a flying pounce onto Tom, knocking the sword out of his hands. He drew up one of his bladed fists and held it overhead with the building threat of a terrible death. Tom initially struggled, then smirked cleverly. "Eh?"

"Hnnnn..." Tom grunted. He threw off one of the arms that held him down with a pistol in his hand. "FUCK YOU!" he quipped as he fired point-blank at Jormungandr's face. A smug sneer of victory grew on his face as he slipped out from his enemy's grip and got up.

"Ah" Jormungandr grunted. Tom looked down, then jumped back to retrieve his sword with a start. Jormungandr was alive, having dodged the bullet by twisting his head completely upside-down. The bullet did, however, graze his chin just by a bit. "Now this hurts. Congratulations, Thomas, you made me hurt my neck to avoid death."

"Dude..." Tom muttered. After seeing a man stand up and twist his head around like an inverted owl, that's all he could say. Shit, that's all _anyone_ could say. Still, with both killers still alive, the fight is destined to go on!


	40. Chainsaw are Evil & the Painter

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Now that Mort was in high spirits, he decided that the time had come for his victim. He kicked down a huge, double-door arch into a hallway with his good, log-thick foot and broke the tiles of the floor with his stomp. His chainsaw revved loudly and gave him an evil grin. Two chainsaw elites were at the end of the hall, clothed in dragging robes and tightly bound from the waist up in leather wrappings with helmets on their heads and, more significantly, metal braces on their necks. Mort didn't care. The hum of his murder tool was so pleasant to him that the incidentals of his opponents equipment didn't matter anymore. It was all good with a chainsaw in his hand.

"HHRRRRRNNNN!!!!" Mort sounded, cranking his chainsaw up. The two guards at the far end of the long hall started running forward, one behind the other, with chainsaws equipped in the exact same style of holding. When one came close enough Mort engaged him with a weighty chainsaw duel. Of course Mort had the advantage of height and used it to press down with his rending weapon of doom drawing closer to the man's helmet. The other guard darted out from behind and made a desperate push up on Mort's blade to free his comrade.

"Why didn't you just kill him?" the one that was saved hissed.

"I couldn't do it, Gabe!" the savior said. "I couldn't let you die! I...I love you!" Gabe, as he was called, and Mort were taken aback in shock, but Gabe suffered a considerable aftershock of horror.

"You do realize" Gabe began "that we're both men, right?" The loving fool nodded. Gabe sighed in frustration and turned off his chainsaw to conserve the gas. "Mark, I told you, I'm straight. I have a wife and two kids! I. Am not. GAY!"

"Maybe not now" Mark said, dropping his saw and grasping Gabe's hands tightly, "but if you just try it..."

"Okay" Mark groaned in disgust. He removed his helmet and dropped to his knee in front of Mort. "Kill me. I'm not gonna hear the end of this anytime soon."

"No, Gabe, you can't!" Mark shouted. "We're a team!"

"Why don't I kill him?" Mort asked.

"That works" Gabe said. Mort revved his saw and thrust it straight through Mark's chest, killing him in a most messy and horrible way. Gabe stood by with his arms crossed and smiled. In his last moments, Mark was heard screaming in some unintelligible manner that made it sound like a dramatically drawn out 'why?' Gabe laughed.

"Thanks for that, dude" Gabe said when Mort finished.

"No problem" Mort growled. He then took a blind swing and decapitated Gabe. Then, with his opponents down, Mort revved his saw loudly and leaned back, slicing into the air and laughing maniacally. "UAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!" Then, all of a sudden, the chainsaw choked, smoked and broke. Mort tried pulling the chain again to fix it, but it did no good. Now that his chainsaw was dead he was able to drop out of his transfixed state of super-violence and got a grip on reality.

"Holy hell!" Mort said in his normal, calm voice. "That was bizarre! When I picked up that chainsaw, all the stereotypical thoughts of uber-murder started flooding into my mind! All the associated villainy that comes with skillfully wielding that weapon just started...possessing me! I couldn't control myself! Normally, I try to at least limit my preferred choice of weapon to a necessity in battle, and I use my hands to incapacitated and murder the weaker prey, but that was absurd! I had no notion of ending my spree whatsoever!"

"WRAAAIIIII!" a chainsaw grunt bellowed. He came tearing down the hall behind Mort ,although his scream had done the opposite intended effect and alerted Mort to his presence, rather than intimidate him into a stun. So, he died quickly, with a swift dodge from Mort and a spinal-tap fist to the back of the head. He then fel forward onto his own saw and decapitated himself in a bloody mess.

"Like that!" Mort pointed out. "That is my method of killing." Mort had to sigh and try to make sense of things. He took the pause in action to wipe his goggles and readjust his blood-saturated clothing. There was silence in the cathedral. All the constant gasoline engine roaring of tree-felling instruments were gone now, the symphony of death having been mercilessly killed by Mort down to the last active players already. Mort could only whistle at the results of his previous (unseen) rampage through the church and laugh a few times at the last corpses that piled up right in front of him. "Time flies when you're having fun, I guess" Mort said. He drew out his shovel, feeling the need for a secure device of death, and started forward with the breeze of fate at his back. "I'm coming now, Gore. Prepare yourself."

As he said that, the silence was broken and the air started moving around him. The dreadful dirges of a pipe organ somewhere deeper into the dark church played, most likely by the hands of this crazed priest himself. Loud and cacophonous laughter came afterwards, not disturbing or drowning out the music. God knows how many crazed fanatics were still left that did _not_ have chainsaws, but they were assuredly coming straight for Mort right now...

* * *

The frightened little possessed girl Angel continued running through the alleys and darker paths of the dirty city. Everything was emotionally overloading for her. She saw the hunger and the poverty that grips the starving people. The derangedness of the city hobos that grabbed at nothing with pleas of food. Roving gangs of kids and nefarious thugs, street walking women of the night, and of course the inevitable, diseased little stray chihuahua. It was driving her to madness!

"Hey giiiirly" a cooing man's voice said from behind. Angel hoped the voice wasn't addressing her, but when she turned she saw five men in matching colors staring her down with eyes hungrier than any hobo. "Where ya going, huh?"

"You want a ride?" another offered. Angel started hyperventilating out of fear, and the men took her weakness as an opportunity to approach.

"You alright?" one said roughly. He grabbed her arm and dragged her into an adjacent alley. Fear started clouding her mind.

"You don't looks so good, girl" another thug said.

"Maybe you need a hug?" one said quite lecherously. A zipping was heard from that same man, and Angel felt someone making a grab for her chest. With what energy she had, she slapped away the hand and kicked behind her in blind defense, hitting her attempting rapist squarely in the balls with a sharpened stiletto heel. The man collapsed, unable to even squeal, to the ground clutching his bloodying pants.

"What the fuck, you whore!" another man yelled. This one gave her a kick to the face and sent her coughing to the ground. Angel started heaving her breaths asthmaticly, finding it harder and harder to stay conscious let alone healthy. She was then pulled up by her hair and held so her feet dangled off the ground. "Don't you have any respect for a man's junk!?" The thug threw her into the wall, and then all hell broke loose. Angel's eyes started twitching uncontrollably, until for some reason, the became completely black.

Meanwhile, Yvonne was racing through the streets, listening in for instructions given by her telepathic friend.

_She turned right here_ Beelzebub instructed, _then started running down the third alley to your right._

"Got it" Yvonne confirmed. She followed the directions up until the end of the alley, then stopped and waited for her companion to recollect its thoughts.

_Take another right_ Beelzebub said with somewhat foggy recollection, _then head straight across the street and through that alley._

"Why was he running through all these alleys?" Yvonne asked. Suddenly, from out of fucking nowhere, a screaming and groaning body lurched out and grabbed Yvonne by the wrists.

"No more!" the body groaned painfully. "AH! No more, mommy! I'll be gooooood!"

"Get off me, freak!" Yvonne ordered. With a stern kick she pushed her attacker away, and with a slamming hit to the head she knocked him out. The zombified man was reduced to a bleeding, twitching lump of body on the sidewalk.

_His spinal fluid has been imbalanced_ Beelzebub observed. _This was the work of your target. She can induce paranoid delusion by prolonging the effects of her hallucinogenic powers._

"Shit" Yvonne cursed. "As if I didn't have enough to deal with, now zombie-morons!?"

_Be wise, Yvonne_ Beelzebub warned. _These people are frightened, not aggressive. Merely scaring them further will be enough to shock them out of consciousness. The bat is a bit unnecessary at this point._

"Fear can make men do drastic things" Yvonne said. "If I'm truly graced by God, then I won't encounter a man who sees me as another man trying to eat his children, or something..." A shambling man rounded the corner and started screaming at Yvonne.

"Stop you cannibal!" he shouted. "STAY AWAY FROM MY WIFE!!!"

_...you were close_ Beelzebub said. _You're eating his wife, apparently._

"Fuck it" Yvonne growled, twirling the bat around in her hand, "I'm the Queen of Killers, the Dame of Death! I'm the fucking Celebrity of Homicide! I don't fucking care if I have to kill one or two of these insignificant pests!" The man came lurching forward, arms outstretched, and got a skull-crushing temple full of titanium alloy. He was dead. "I'll just chalk them up as means to justify the end!"

_That way lies corruption_ Beelzebub warned.

"Which way!?" Yvonne snarled.

_Straight ahead_ Beelzebub instructed. _She is getting closer, it seems. If you cut across the street and alley, we should see her._ Yvonne did just that. She sprinted across the street and through the alley, hopping over the hobo and punting away the creepy little dog, then darted her head around to search for her mysterious little target. She could see more deranged people, crouched over and weeping in fear from her obvious presence, but the demon herself was still nowhere around.

"Where the hell..." Yvonne growled. Unaware of danger, Yvonne stepped into the open street. All the huddled bodies suddenly started shuffling away on all fours. The fear had made all the people on the street rabid and vicious. They were abused dogs looking for revenge. They were the beaten children and the neglected husbands that were driven to gang warfare for lack of a real-life outlet of grief. They were manic, and they only had eyes for Yvonne right now.

_I'd use a better weapon_ Beelzebub said. Yvonne grinned her slim and shiny growling grin and wielded her bat in the off hand. The evils started running and leaping on all fours with gnashing teeth and barking growls. Easy prey...

* * *

While Yvonne cleaned up after Angel's mess, and after the rapist-thugs were killed by Angel's awesome power, the terrified girl found herself utterly lost in a wooded area. She emerged from the sparsely spread trees onto a walkway and found herself in the park. No one else was there but her, so she decided to rest easily for now. She panted, facing the dirt, and walked to a bench.

"It's too much" Angel wept. "All this running, the killing...I can't take it! Please, oh please, somebody save me from all this. I want to stop running! I just want some peace from the world...from my mind!"

"Most people ask for peace _of_ mind" a mysterious man said, "but you, fuck that! You want total existential peace!" Angel fearfully raised her head and looked around. There was no one in the park, she saw, but there was someone else sitting on her bench. A man in a dark trench coat with thin arms and an angular head, twirling a paint brush between his fingers. "An all consuming state of euphoric loneliness. Ah, that is something all of us sociopaths desire. We want a boat to get us through the ocean, and we don't want any damn water to get in the boat or we'll drown, right?"

"Who are you?" Angel asked.

"Please ask me something else" the man said tiredly. "Everyone asks that question when they meet me, followed by 'What do you want with me!?' or 'Why is there something really fucking hot in my anus!?'"

"...okay" Angel said. "Um, what's with that brush?"

"Oh this!?" the man replied, stopping the brush and somehow transforming it into a bloody knife. The man leaned in to reveal his utterly sleep-deprived face and demonic eyes that were utterly devoid of the contagious fear that Angel hated. Then with a hiss he answered

"**I'm a painter..."**


	41. Cold shivers of Fear

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Sam navigated his way through the dust-ridden tunnels that ran below the town. It was indeed some kind of abandoned government base, he could immediately tell. The corridors were short cut, very narrow, and sealed off rooms were more than common. All the doors and windows were blockaded with some kind of metal. Most disturbing was the sense of loneliness down here. Namely, that Sam didn't have it. There was a lingering presence following him all over the place, but he was too quick to dismiss it as nonsense.

"It's just paranoia" Sam told himself. "The brain can trick the body into feeling presence that isn't there when there isn't anyone around. It's part of human nature to want to feel comfortable, and as social creatures our most basic instinct is to return to the pack. I'm just imagining some foreign heat so I don't have to feel completely alone down here...although, it's more unnerving than helpful..." The mad doctor Von Gott had lost the visual contact with Sam, but he knew where he was.

"How regretful, my pet" Gott said, twiddling the fingers in one hand, "it seems he entered the catacombs." The mystery figure holding the bird button in the corner hissed. "Not to worry at all. This is only a set-back. None of my creatures, in their instinctively fine-tuned state, would dare to go down there. They know better..." Unfortunately Sam did not know better, and he proceeded through the dank and colorless hallways hoping he was approaching rather than going away.

"I need to think logically" Sam said. He stopped and rested his back against a corner. This calmed his mind as he could see down both long stretches of hall and he was completely guarded from behind, making the uneasy feeling of staring eyes nothing but a pointless notion. "My target is occupying the town's main building, the Town Hall. In a government base, they would want to keep up an appearance for the major testing figures to be able to covertly retreat to without suspicion from the subjects. They would call the higher-ups politicians and have them reside in the Town Hall, but in reality they were going back to work. Therefore, the Town Hall must be a larger, mass-transport hub to get multiple testers into the base at once." With that logic in mind, Sam removed his back from the corner and looked between the two halls. "Now I need to decide."

"..." replied the empty darkness. Silence, total skin-crawling silence. Sam could hear his heart beating, his bone's creaking, his skin moving, his hair growing; it was fucking quiet. Sam's breath suddenly became freezing, and his throat suffered with a dry itch out of nowhere.

_The air down here_ Sam noticed _is decades old. It's so stagnant I can't breath in it. I need to move around or I might collapse. _Sam moved on that impulse to the right, down a hall that led into a larger room. This room was particularly dangerous to his psyche. There were columns, thick and numerous, spread a fair distance apart from each other. Sam could see one door at the other end, a straight shot through the pillars all around. _Easy. Just walk._ Despite his adamant desire to do so, his legs refused to respond. _Walk _he repeated. Still he stayed in one spot. Some arcane force compelled him to turn around, but he ignored it. His only want, his need right now was to find his target and kill him!

_**WALK!**_

At his fearsome demand his legs wrenched themselves loose and started marching. The air moved away from him as he walked, spreading the larger floating dust particles into the pillars.

"..." still the uncomfortable silence sang. There was nothing in the entire underground existence but the stomping of Italian leather on concrete and the soft metal clacking of guns that were strapped to Sam's back. It was one man in the whole limited world...or was it? Regardless of Sam's self-aware nagging he couldn't let go of the notion that he was seeing **faces out of the corner of his eye,** ducking behind or into the pillars as Sam passed them. It was starting to get him riled up.

_Natural instincts_ Sam told himself. _Even if the human mind tricks itself into feeling secure by placing fake presence all around the body, there still isn't anything there. Coupled with an inherit fear of the unknown, feeling strange and unfelt presences can make anyone scared..._

"**hhhh...**" hissed the silence. Now Sam was getting scared and started jogging. The faster he ran and the loud the sound he made doing so, the louder the silence hissed at him. It was a breathy, strangled wind one second, an animalistic lowing the next. Sam's mind was obviously at odd ends with his body, as the natural instincts of this creature wanted it to turn around.

"Fuck off..." Sam whispered.

"**Fuck...off...**" he heard again. This stopped him, it made him actually stop with a skid and snapped his body around. There were no doors in this hall, no vents on the ceiling. There were solid walls bordering a solid floor below a solid roof. Still, whatever was pursuing Sam found refuge somewhere and disappeared, one slowly back into the room of columns Sam came from. Sam's breathing got heavy suddenly. Sweat started forming, from either fear or the pure stagnancy of the air he couldn't tell.

"This is starting to get annoying" Sam whispered to himself. The brief hissings that kept him company suddenly stopped, and he realized just what silence was again. He heard his heart and his skin again, and then he heard a hiss. Sam's keen eyes picked up movement from the stirred dust in the air he ran through just moments before. From the open square doorway into the pillar room, he heard a hiss and saw the dust swirl around as if **something was breathing** just around the corner.

* * *

_Stay calm_ Sam echoed internally. He stayed focused on the moving air down the hall and waited for something bad to happen. He listened closely as he heard his muscles moving in his arm, reaching eagerly for his holy gun...

_Stay calm_ he reminded himself. A solid minute passed of waiting. The dusty air continued to annoyingly stir from just around the unseen corner and Sam's body was still on guard. Now his body had ceased moving. His heart slowed drastically. Even the churning of his intestinal fluid went silent. Finally, he could be positive about his unnecessary paranoia. Yes, something breathed around that corner. It was a definite, steady and most unnerving of all patient breathing. It was waiting for Sam to move, but why Sam could not venture.

_Stay calm_ he reminded again. For some reason, the need to remind himself started losing purpose. He knew to stay calm, that wasn't the problem. Right now Sam was wishing he could muster the intellect to tell himself 'Stay Sane'

"Fuck it!" Sam impulsively shouted. He took out his gun and blasted a hole in space, pushing the air away from the bullet and causing a vacuum that added to the already catastrophic destruction that gun caused. The dust didn't kick up when the crater was made, but instead the rubble settled neatly around the huge hole. More dust started slowly coming in from around the corner. At first it came in from just around the wall, then the source of the pushing, the fastest moving particles of dust, started getting closer. Sam acted on his previous statement and started running away.

_God damn lapse in judgment!_ Sam chided. _Now it's chasing me, isn't it!?_ Sam dared not look back, but something told him that he was indeed being chased by some predatory force. Sam tried his best to stay rational, but the sinking depression of being lost in an unknown place coupled with the faces that kept popping in the periphery of his vision were getting to him again. He picked up his pace and had a lapse of genius. If something was chasing him, he'd intimidate it with (what else) guns! He took the ditch guns that he looted from the mercenary corpses and started blind-firing behind him. He heard the impact of many bullets, but beyond that nothing.

"Where's an exit!?" Sam shouted, hoping something good would happen to show him the way. A four-way cross came up and Sam decided to turn left, for reasons he couldn't quite reach. Despite the strange decision, part of Sam's instincts were content with it. Machines started becoming frequent, although annoyingly placed in the middle of the hall. Stretchers and gurneys neatly bordered the walls, making the actual corridors much more narrow. In between reloading his automatics, Sam was positive that he could hear something moving the metals of a stretcher. Then another. Soon he was certain, and the need to suppress the want to turn around and confirm the very loud movings of metal and plastics just behind him. He could even hear his clacking or his heart over the annoying shuffling of objects.

Finally, after an infinity of retreating and insane tension, Sam found his destination. An elevator. Not even one so sophisticated as to harbor the associated name, this was a hydrolic lift, and a huge one at that. It could easily fit a few cars. Sam breathed a sigh of relief upon seeing the dimly illuminated structure and he picked up his pace in excitement. As he broke into the final stretch that led into a larger loading-dock sort of corridor, one with ramps branching off into different sections of the base, he had to stop. On the lift was a simple little panel with a button for up and a button for down. Sam stopped because crouched behind that panel was something that chilled him to the very core. Behind it was **a little girl, staring at him through black eyes and gray skin.**

"No..." Sam muttered. His senses were cranked into overdrive from the sheer terror coursing through his body, and the all-too unsettling hiss that accompanied the previous silence breathed down his neck. Corner by a cliché and an unspeakable terror... _Shit..._

Nothing but nihilistic darkness clouded Sam's mind there and then. He could see no good things happening for him anymore. There was no future, no path out, nowhere for him to go anymore. Nothing, just plain nothing.

"That's when I cracked" a voice narrated form unseen reaches of existence. "When I decided the overwhelming force of fear was too much for me to fight against, I embraced it. I used it. I **owned** it. I made fear my bitch, and I learned how to use it. That's when I lost my humanity, not to be found for many, many years. My sanity followed after it, although I still doubt that that's around anymore at all. When faced with overwhelming fear, I have experienced, humans always take a proverbial high road and go into what I refer to as a 'God Mode'. Total id control. The super-ego dissolves. The human's life boils entirely down to what needs to be done to survive, nothing else."

Sam stayed rigid, clutched his fist in anger and took in a sharp breath.

"AAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!" he roared. He spun around and stared down another ghost, this one a taller, lanky man with short black hair combed down his face and an exposed skeletal eye-hole. Sam didn't care about the details of his enemy, he just knew that it had to leave him alone. So he kicked it, finding it oddly physical for a ghost, grabbed it by the shoulders and brought it down for a horrible knee to the face. Then he grabbed it by the hair, ignored that the rest of its face was exposed bone, and judo-flipped it over his shoulder. The little girl started crawling in the creepiest way, on all fours with hideous joint manipulation, on the walls and then up on the ceiling. Sam wasn't fucking around, the ghosts could tell, so they both ganged up on him. Sam pushed past necessity and survival and stayed, using his holy bullets to shatter the ghosts into dust so he could feel the accomplishment of killing the undead.

* * *

"...why...?" the air whispered. The visible dust particles suddenly converged at the far end of the room into a cowering bunch of familiar ghosts. People of obvious European roots with the same shade of dead gray skin and pitch-black hair. Sam snapped out of his killing world, cracked his neck, and looked over.

"You startled me" Sam calmly replied. "My judgment tends to lapse out when I get scared..."

"My bad" the male ghost said, standing up. "We...we just desperate."

"Vengeance?" Sam asked, pointing out the most obvious cliché he could think of.

"Freedom" the little girl said. The dust from all over, including form within Sam's lungs, came pouring into the room. In moments, a village worth of tortured souls was congregated to face Sam with sad faces. "We want to be free so badly."

"Did anyone else hear a voice a bit ago?" Sam asked incidentally.

"No" the ghosts answered one after the other.

_Who the hell was talking...?_ Sam asked. _It didn't sound like Gott at all. It sounded...maniacal._

"Can you help us, sir?" the girl asked again.

"I've screwed your own pooch, I'm afraid" Sam said unapologetically. "You see, when you decided to scare me shitless you lost any chance of me befriending you."

"We already know you're going to kill that doctor" the boy ghost said. "We want him dead too. We've all decided to stay behind the gates of Heaven and Hell so we could see that sinful bastard die. If you're going to kill him, please make it merciless. Make him suffer, make him really wish he had died a long time ago!"

"Ah" Sam said, quite speechlessly. "Yes, that I can easily do, but not for you."

"We will thank you anyway" a lady ghost said. "That lift will lead you just across the street from his main lair. You can get across if you run."

"I've been running" Sam said. "It's _out_running I need to really practice."

"We believe in you, mysterious man" the ghosts cheered. Sam ignored them and moved onto the lift. He activated it and watched the two-and-a-half stories sink as he rose.

"Jesus fucking Christ..." Sam said breathlessly. Despite the somewhat comical ending, the preceding parts still struck him. All that fear, all those faces, they were real all along. His mind wasn't playing tricks on him, they were really there. His first encounter with ghosts had perpetuated all the known clichés he had ever heard of! "When I kill this guy I'm gonna shove a pipe up his ass and pull out his teeth to make up for all the years I lost down there...Shit!" Now Sam was above ground again, out of his personal hell and away from the ghosts. Still, the event had stuck with him in terrible ways. Right now, due to the paranoia and utter dismal attitude of hopelessness he had worked up in his final encounter with his fear, he was too afraid to move for the door.

_...walk..._ he pleaded. It may be a while before his body decides to obey...


	42. The Heat of Battle

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

"Dude..." Tom muttered. Jormungandr had just played his most sinister hand. Demonstrating the ability that gave him his name. Jormungandr, the world serpent, an evil snake that entwines all the good and evil with its irrepressible grip. Jormungandr has the innate ability to manipulate his body as freely of bones and cartilage as a boneless and cartilage-less snake would. With the possible exception of twisting his head until his spine breaks, Jormungandr can contort his body in totally unholy ways. Projectile weapons may very well be useless against this trained super-soldier, and Tom's only melee weapon is left limp and ineffective against Jormungandr deadly claws. There truly seems to be no hope for the young killer now...but for some reason he is smiling.

"Dude!" Tom shouted in admiration. Jormungandr tilted his head questionably at his young opponent. "That's fucking coool! You're like Psycho-Matis or some shit!"

"Ah, yes" Jormungandr lowed. "That **abomination.** The Japanese really don't know how to write for a proper schizophrenic mind reader, I'll tell you that!"

"Screw you!" Tom defended "Hideo Kojima is a bad-ass!"

"Enough!" Jormungandr roared. Tom reposed his sword and prepared to defend himself against his newly-proven worthy foe. "Thomas Quindale this is exactly why I must kill you! You have let the pop-culture of video games clutter your mind with unrealistic thoughts of murder! You think, through some backwards logic, that being an excellent killer in a simulation will make you an excellent killer in real life! You are akin to the med-school student who can't deal with death! You can't really kill anyone without asserting your force as a murderer! A cold-blooded, psychopathic jackass!!!"

"Like you?" Tom said. "I think my style can speak for itself. Besides, when I kill you I'll get a better reputation than just 'participant' in this game. I'll be up there with Sam and Mort and, maybe to a different extent, Yvonne!"

"Oh, like you have the guts for that" Jormungandr skeptically said. He started marching forward in a power-walking gait, his arms down and limp at his sides. "You can't bring yourself to any cold-blooded act no matter how hard you try. You know why?" Jormungandr was getting too close for Tom's comfort, and the retreating began. Tom started backing up in even pace with Jormungandr's walk across the long and debris-filled room. As he walked he took the time in the calm of the fight to observe his surroundings and develop a plan. "You can't detach yourself from your precious mommy and daddy. They instilled such concrete 'morals' and 'values' into you that you truly believe some of the utter nonsense humanity spouts at you. You can't kill because, above all things, it's a bad thing to do. Your parents said so."

"Yeah well" Tom began rather casually, "they never specifically said that." Tom pulled out a gun and shot upward. A dart stuck into the ceiling and started beeping. Jormungandr made the mistake of looking up out of curiosity and failed to see Tom quickly retreating. When he looked back down and realized the danger it was too late. The nitro-glyceride and francium in the home-made bomb made an enormous explosion that crumbled and toppled the whole second and third levels of the building into the first floor, right on Jormungandr. Despite the obviously overwhelming chance of death by crushing, Jormungandr made his best efforts to dodge the debris while Tom fled into an elevator.

"I'm alright with killing people" Tom said "as long as the walk through wants me to." His last words were said with a heavy hinting of self-centered sarcasm, poking one last bit of fun at the ghastly opponent while Tom safely headed up to the roof level with a smile on his face. Jormungandr made one last glare through the dust and concrete before getting swallowed by the brown-gray cloud. Tom sighed with great relief and fell against the wall of the elevator. "Shit. I didn't think those bomb-dart...things would actually work! The mechanics of them were all screwy when I built them and the francium had, like, a three percent chance of actually detonating. I must be pretty damn lucky. The after-life must want that jackass deader than dead!"

Tom decided, in his spare minutes in the slow elevator, to play a quick game on his hand held. He got out his device which will remain unnamed and started playing with great ease and focus. Whether or not Jormungandr was still alive, he could care less, but the experience he had gotten from video gaming told him that Jormungandr was indeed still alive and coming for him in some fashion. "My money's on the elevator" Tom told himself to entertain the thought further. "That or the stairs. It'd be pretty funny if he came up through the stairs..."

Jormungandr was not coming up through the stairs. Outside in the streets where the firefighters and police futily gathered to control the destruction a single car had caused by ramming into an office complex building, Jormungandr was taking a chance.

"Thomas" he very quietly lowed while looking out at the gathered masses, "I know your moves better than you do. I can shadow your every movement and understand all of your openings. How can you stay so bright when you know that you face the ultimate opponent...!?" Jormungandr started clawing his way up the building, from the outside, digging into thick concrete with his deadly metal gloves. "How can you win...**against yourself?**"

* * *

Minutes later, Tom arrived at the top. He had just finished winning at something and stowed his gaming device in the pocket near his chest.

"That'll give him a laugh" Tom remarked. "If he wants to go in for a stab or heart-stopping palm-blast, he'll hit a video game. My gaming will save my life and he'll get pissed. Or surprised. There's an equal chance of both happening." Tom worked through the individual chances of Jormungandr coming up through various ways and decided to take some precautions. He retrieved a stretch of nearly invisible piano wire from his many-pouched suit and walked to the stairwell door. He laid it out just beyond the doors swinging reach as detailed by the skid marks on the concrete roof, and stretched it out. His plan, obviously, was to either trip Jormungandr or distract him with an incredibly rudimentary method of tripping. Either way, it would give Tom an opportunity.

Tom didn't know it, but his assumptions were wrong. Jormungandr came up over the side of the building and dropped silently to the roof like a corpse. Then, keeping his chest almost to the ground, he began to crawl with amazingly fluid pacing. He made no sound, not even the metal on concrete, so great was his control of movement. He controlled every pull and twist of his muscles with absolute precision. He moved like a mechanical snake slithering barely along the surface of calm waters. And not that snake went in to kill its prey.

_Thomas..._ Jormungandr hissed internally, _don't take this personally. I just need one less of you inhabiting this planet to live a peaceful assassin's life!_ Jormungandr came up from behind like a fog, came up high with his claws spread out overhead, and sent his attack down to Tom's skull. Tom drew his sword from his back, jumped forward, and slashed across Jormungandr fingers. The metal of the claws had protected him, but situational awareness prevented him from dodging. His fingers were cut...bad.

"You think I'm a moron!?" Tom asked rhetorically.

"Yes" Jormungandr answered.

"I knew, if you lived, you'd come up the side of the building!" Tom announced. "How could you not!? It's so overdone and traditional! However, I do find it unsettling that I couldn't even detect you until I was almost dead."

"How in all possible, shit-filled hell" Jormungandr began with a growl "did you know where I was? I concentrated over one-hundred percent of my mind on remaining undetectable!"

"No" Tom said "you were just unlucky. Regardless as to where you were at the time, the waiting was killing me, so I just decided to start swinging to keep myself sharp. When I felt the cold chill you carried from climbing up to this high altitude exposed to the wind, I knew you were either behind me or close enough to me to make my mind send my body a warning. You just got unlucky."

"..." Jormungandr glowered. Even through the abysmal black of his suit's shades, Tom could feel the heat and the hate in his gaze. Tom smiled at that hate. It was a sign of respect from this polished killer. Now Tom was in the big leagues, he had upset an upsetting upstart of an assassin and earned his anger. Now things would get serious. "I'm almost proud of you, Thomas" Jormungandr said with a sobbing choke. "It makes me sad that I'm feeding your corpse to my pet panthers and using your hair to crochet with!"

"You crochet?" Tom said in disgust. "You emo-bitch." Jormungandr and Tom began their fight anew. Tom wielded his sword in both hands, holding it steady and firmly away from his body while Jormungandr kept both his hands palm-forward and claws tensed. The blood that ran onto his palm where his fingers were cut. Tom made the first move. He sprang forward and made a rather offensive swing into Jormungandr's hands. Jormungandr caught it, grabbed it, and instead of throwing the sword off the building he repelled Tom backwards and slammed him off the stairwell wall. As he started forward he did so with a jump so as to avoid the obvious wire.

_Did he really expect me to fall for that archaic trick?_ It may have been a second too late, after he saw Tom's proud and eager smile, but Jormungandr realized quickly the folly he took in avoiding the wire. _Of course he did! He expected me to jump over it! My defense is decreased drastically in the air! I can't get a foothold to properly twist myself! If I dodge him now I'll land awkwardly and get killed anyway! DAMN YOU, THOMAS!!_

"Biiiitch!" Tom droned. He raised up his sword and made a stab that Jormungandr dodged by hideously twisting himself around at the waist, thereby squeezing all his skin and organs up and down so the only visible part of him was the spine Tom had missed in stabbing. Tom jumped up from the ground and slid to his feet while Jormungandr landed in his disturbing state. He tried to make the best of it by planting his feet and snapping back around with his claws out, but for some reason Tom saw through that as well and just backed off until he was through. Not Jormungandr was in danger. Tom was still coming, his sword still sharp and ready, and he couldn't twist out of the way in time.

Metal sliced flesh. Right through the arm.

* * *

"Gah!" Jormungandr shouted in pain. He jumped away, then jumped again to gain even more ground. Tom knew better than to shoot at a target like him, so he just stayed his blade down and let the blood drip off it.

"Is that it?" Tom asked. "Is that really the end of your killing power? Honestly, I can't believe I trained for this!"

"Trained how!?" Jormungandr shouted. You beat off to all the Japanese-inspired smut you could find and flexed in the mirror!?"

"Hey!" Tom shouted. "I don't harp on you for what gets you off, you leave me alone about it!"

"I'm getting sick of this" Jormungandr growled, panting now. "My arm is immobile, the muscles sliced apart. My mind is clouded by rage and dismay! And my face, my poor face, it burns out of pity!"

"What now?" Tom said as he ran forward. "Have you finally stepped over the stereotype line and gone mad? Are you gonna give me a philosophical lecture next?"

"Thomas" Jormungandr lowed, "I want you to search deep inside yourself for a moment. Search as deep as you can...and _try_ to find someone with the balls to kill me!" His taunting to Tom sounded like a serious demand, but for some reason Tom decided to treat it as a taunt. He mad e flying leap with his sword over his opposite shoulder and sliced down. Of course, Jormungandr dodged easily, but the next attack was unseen. Tom brought his hand around and smashed it into Jormungandr's side with the pommel. The attack was so unforeseen that Jormungandr had to stagger away helplessly and gasp. Tom made the motion to lop off his head, and had all the serious want to do so that he needed, but he heard laughing.

"What's up?" Tom asked. "Are you mad?"

"Mad? Maybe..." Jormungandr said, "but Thomas, I doubt you'd survive sanely after this!" Jormungandr turned sharply around and threw the rags that covered his face into Tom's vision. Tom sliced them away, then got hit by the goggles. Then a swift kick came from nowhere and pushed him away. The clouds above the foreign city broke, and for once Tom saw a familiar sight in the pale light. Jormungandr had revealed his face...but Tom saw his face ins its place.

"Thomas" Jormungandr said, moving the lisp Tom knew belonged to him, "can you use your amazing powers of deduction to solve this?" Jormungandr's face, save its obvious presence of a lost sanity, looked exactly, no, it didn't look like anything. **It was Thomas Quindale's face.** "Can you piece it together!?" In all unspoken honesty, Tom couldn't. This was the first real mind-fuck he had encountered, and it did its work well. Tom lowered his head in defeat and loosened the grip on his sword until it nearly fell from his hand. Jormungandr took a cautious step forward and started something up in Tom's body.

"We are the same man, Thomas" Jormungandr said in his purely evil voice. "The experiments...all of us...we are the last ones. I killed the rest because I realized how fruitless a life like that would be. Doing the work of someone else under the same name as the hundreds that preceded me. Far be it from me, a truly intelligent being, to develop a sense of submissive, nihilistic self. I wanted to be free of an ascribed life. I wanted my own power and glory! But you...somehow you just had to get out into the public! Those bastards that made us all had those fucking fail-safes, and forced me to hunt down the thousands of me's all over the globe so I could live without the fear of duplicated purpose!!!"

Tom hiccuped. It was strange, especially for a man who knew how rare it was for his own body to do such a thing, to hear and see it happen. Suddenly, Tom's arms started rising up and they took the sword diagonally in front of his chest. His face went from the cocky man from before to completely emotionless. Without a proper explanation or introduction, Tom spoke.

"Threat assessed" Tom robotically said. Jormungandr backed off and grinned, keeping his caution and awareness fully focused. "Setting AI mode: Hard mode on. Extra precautions will be taken to eliminate target. Area partially mapped. Starting run of '.'"

"That's your inner killer?" Jormungandr skeptically asked as the new, id-powered Tom charged more fluidly than ever. "A computer program!?!?" Tom made a sweep that seemed to cleave Jormungandr straight in half. From the front, only the left side of his torso was visible and the leg seemed to dangle helplessly after a few seconds. Then he turned, revealing the rest of his chest had in fact bent around and the shoulder blades of his back were touching from far end to end. "And you call me...traditional!? You still have your basic programming in, **maggot!!!**"

As Tom was again dead to the outside world, he made no attempt at a rebuttal. The program is running, and nothing can stop it anymore...


	43. The Talk of Painting

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

"You're...a painter?" Angel nervously repeated. Johnny nodded at her, his white eyes and angular smile shining brighter than the blade in his hand. He moved uncomfortably close to her and growled. "What...do you paint?" Johnny stopped breathing for a second, then threw himself off of her, almost teleporting away. He held his hands to his face and groaned.

"Don't ask that!" he demanded. "That's too cliché to ask. Come up with something original to ask me, something cool! Come, on" he said, pacing away, then suddenly reappearing in her face like a bad illusion and shouted "WOW ME!" Angel sank back into the bench seat. She found it nearly impossible to concentrate hard enough to use her powers on this peculiar man.

"Um..." she started, "why do you paint?" she timidly asked at length.

"Why?" Johnny repeated. With a laugh he started walking back and sat down beside her, then rested his chin in his folded hands. "Why?" he repeated, hoping he would have an answer this time. "Hmm, that's a very good question. I feel stupid now. I don't have an answer for you..."

"You don't know?" Angel asked.

"It's not that I don't know" Nny admitted. "It's that no answer seems to...fit me, you know?" Angel listened in and batted her lashes at Nny, prompting him hopefully to continue. "I know why I used to paint. It was out of enjoyment, because I loved to paint! It was one of my greater carnal pleasures, as it were. I loved it...the freedom. Then my reason shifted gradually, actually it was almost instantly, from love to money, and I was corrupted. I was made apathetic to what I previously considered to be a greater thing. My art became...shit. Stick-figures spewing obscenities that the under-shoe shit of society found to be funny. Then the universe imploded and my art stopped. I went insane, tried to find myself, and now...I'm not sure why I paint. Maybe to vent unknown anxiety that I get from this nomadic, uncertain life of mine onto the walls of the world I so begrudgingly inhabit."

"...Oh" Angel responded. "What other reasons can you think of?"

"Is that one not good enough?" Nny asked. Angel bit her tongue, trying hard not to provoke this man with a knife in his hand. "No, you're right, that's too trivial. I need an actual answer, don't I. Why do I paint, and so frequently at that? It's a burning question, not unlike a whore's burning sensation. She can't get it treated unless she tells people about it, and her reluctance to do so often results in infection that throws her out of the line of her duty...wow, that was a stupid analogy. I apologize for that."

"It's alright" Angel timidly whispered. "Maybe you just want to?"

"No" Nny said. "No, that doesn't explain some of the finer details. You see I set out, a long time ago, to eliminate the 'want' from my life. I tried to become an insect, emotionless and unwanting, doing only what is needed to survive. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, I realized that what I was doing was based not on a need but yet another want and my sanity quickly eroded away. I can't remember all the details of the torrid nightmare of unliving I experienced. I distinctly remember a room, but I can't picture it. It's like trying to look back on a dream you had. You can see the general outline but the whole picture escapes you. Anyway, when I came out of that state of being I was surrounded by paintings. I was in a state of inhuman drive, consumed only by my need to exist. Now I need to ask, if your theory should hold true, what damned creature needs to exercise its artistic flexibility with ink and paint to live?" Nny was actually asking her, and it took Angel a second to form her answer.

"I'm sorry" she said solemnly "but I can't think of anything." Nny smiled.

"So I was dead" Nny said "by your logic. I was a ghost driven on my past instincts, perhaps, taking what I knew was my body out of desperation to cling to life? Maybe? Perhaps? Then why, I ask now, would I continue to live like this after reaching a higher state of being...?"

"um..." Angel began. All the facts, if they were indeed facts, were lined up in such a way that she could not possibly rebut them in a timely or thoughtful fashion. "May be...you're just...supposed to paint?" Her suggestion, while abstract and somewhat arcane, made the maniac happy. Nny smiled with big, circular eyes and a sharp smile. With a breath he took a step in from under the street lamp and sat next to Angel again. He was a shadow with stripes, a grinning demon of satisfaction now.

"I like that answer" Nny hissed. "I like that a lot!" Moments of extreme discomfort passed between the two, a cosmic wind of uncertainty blowing up Angel's skirt telling her 'something is fucking wrong with this guy'...

* * *

Across town, Yvonne continued fighting her way through the streams of frightened men and women who saw her as the object of their unparalleled hatred and all-consuming fear. Men attacked viciously, women sprayed mace and fired tasers, all in the effort to defeat their own illusions brought on by Angel's curious power.

"This is really pissing me off" Yvonne growled.

_It won't get easier_ Beelzebub said from her head. _From what I can perceive, there is an army of these zombified people between us and our target._

"Shit" Yvonne cursed. She beat a man's skull in and shot a woman in the gut, blowing her insides out. She was killing random innocent people left and right, acting completely apathetic and relatively impatient as she did. The blood splattering on her saggy sweatshirt and leg warmers didn't bother her. Oddly, the blood getting in her bleach-blond hair didn't bother her either. For once, Yvonne was truly in the killing moment. For a few brief flashes of sheer pleasureful seconds, she didn't even care about her target. She just loved killing.

_Concentrate_ Beelzebub reminded her. _We aren't here to commit Genocide. I know where the target is._

"Where?" Yvonne asked, pounding another civilian's skull into the concrete.

_She's remained static for quite a while_ Beelzebub explained. _Among her I can sense a presence that escapes my words. It is...strange, as if the universe has gone mad and that madness is sitting next to her._

"Where is she!?" Yvonne asked. She saw a semi-truck barreling down the road with a crazed, scared man behind the wheel. This man was grotesquely fat and saw Yvonne as a delicious hot dog dripping with grease.

"Hot dog hurt chest!" the man stupidly said out of fear. "Me kill bad meat! RAWWRARAGGARHAGWGR!!!!" After his slobbering, maniacal fit he turned the truck and started mowing over everyone in his path. Yvonne pulled out her gun and shot the diver dead, then used her unheard of athletic skill to jump from the truck's hood to the top of the cab and then ran along its top until she was within jumping distance from a traffic light. She made a leap, for once able to ignore who could see her as she was not wearing a skirt and had a leotard on over her underwear, and clinged desperately to the wire. The truck crashed into a building and a somewhat muted explosion followed.

"Well that was annoying" Yvonne said. She displayed her athletics further by flipping herself onto the yellow-flashing lights, far from the reach of all the terrified, homicidal people.

"It's going to eat us!" a woman shouted.

"That's the ugliest bitch I ever SEEN!" a random man shouted, obviously afraid of ugly women. Yvonne shot him out of blind rage and stowed her gun in its holster.

_The park_ Beelzebub said. _She and...it are in the park._

"I don't care about it" Yvonne declared. "I just want to kill this bitch once and for all!"

_Something still troubles me_ Beelzebub confessed _about this other presence._ Yvonne ignored her companions ranting and found something useful, and unaffected person driving a car. He looked quite confused and had a passenger, but it was still a chance Yvonne didn't want to pass. The car veered around on the street, trying to avoid all the shambling people who were gazing at the traffic light with what looked like fear and disbelief.

"What's going on?" the long-faced young man asked.

"Get going, dumbass!" the girl beside him with the tied-up hair and the over-priced dress. She was obviously a bitch and the guy was either a doting friend who thought he had a chance in hell or a very submissive boyfriend who thought he had a chance in hell.

"I can't!" he said apologetically. "There's people in the way."

"A dingo stole my baby!!!" a woman screamed in terror. That woman ran up and smashed her head against the window, making the driver fidget fearfully and pushing the bitchy passenger to her impatient edge. The girl leaned over and started blaring the horn. The illusions took over, and everyone suddenly became deer staring down the headlights. Deer, mind you, with the strength and intellect of humans. They could judge just how fast the car was going and acted to make sure it went nowhere. They all leaped at the car and started pounding dents into it at the risk of their own hands. Yvonne dropped down onto the hood of the car and retrieved her gun.

"FUCKING DIE!" She shouted. She started shooting all around, killing every manic fear-driven psycho she saw, until none of them were left. Bullets that is. There were plenty psychos left after she ran out of ammo. Yvonne through the gun away and heard the door open.

"Who the fuck are you, bitch!?" the impatient girl from the car demanded. Yvonne just glanced over at her, then whipped her permed hair around and concentrated on the road that would go to the park. She tapped on the roof of the car with her bat and knelt down so the driver could see her.

"Could you be a sweety" she cooed "and drive me to the park? I need to meet someone there right away."

"uh..." the self-conscious young man grunted.

"You don't have to let me in" Yvonne said, adding a seductive quality to her voice. She slid down and batted away a lurching person behind her, baring her fine, smooth legs on the hood of the young man's car hood.

"Get off there!" the bitchy girl shouted. Yvonne pursed her lips and started to roll around to the other side of the hood so the young man could see. He was hypnotized by, among other things he saw, he silky skin and flowing blond hair. Yvonne stopped herself and glared at the girl long enough for zombies to overtake her.

"Give it back!" a man shouted as he grabbed her. "I need that to peeeeee!!!"

"What!?" the girl shouted. Yvonne waved good-bye with her bat and the car slowly started driving down the street towards the park.

"Mark!?" The girl shouted in anger. Another person grabbed at her, then another until she was being grabbed from all over. "Mark?" she now asked out of fear. "MARK!" In an instant the mindless plebeians shifted from stoic and shambling to crazed and started ripping flesh from the girl's bone. Her last known sounds were ear-piercing screams that made the night sky bleed...

* * *

"This is nice, isn't it?" Nny asked his terrified new friend. "Just sitting on a nice night like this. It really is a nice night, isn't it? To just sit and talk?"

"Yes..." Angel nervously replied. She wanted to run, with every fiber of her still conscious being she wanted to run away from this man, but some intangible force tethered her to that bench. "Um...I have to go."

"Well then go" Nny said. Still, she didn't move. "Why do you have to go? And where?"

"I'm..." Angel began, unsure as to whether or not this man could be trusted with this information. "I'm being hunted. Someone is trying to kill me because of my power to manipulate brain fluids and induce mad panic attacks in people and animals. It has something to do with my parents, and a blood debt to hell and everything...it sounds crazy but its true..."

"I believe it" Nny said. Angel looked at him in disbelief, but he looked perfectly serious. He crossed his legs with his steel-toed, goat-boot wagging in the air. "I've been to hell. It's not a nice place. It can drive sane men mad and mad men sane...and even more mad as well. But there aren't any burning lakes or skies of fire. No puddings of shit or hounds with eleven heads full of shark teeth to hump you if you turn away. It's just full of unforgivably stupid people."

"Huh?" Angel grunted timidly.

"I went to hell once" Nny explained very normally. "I think I went to hell. It may have been a rally stupid dream to veer me away from killing myself again...although...if I died then I very well may have gone to hell. I went to Heaven first though, that's the weird thing."

"What should I do?" Angel asked, suddenly hoping for an answer from this maniac man. "I can easily fend her off, but I'm afraid of being caught that I can't bare the thought of actually standing up to her. What should I do, sir?"

"Well, let me tell you something" Nny said as he stood up to pace for his rant. "In my little adventures I found the perfect way to defend my life when the condition of the human mind lets me down. I just shut it off. I don't know how it happened, but somewhere I gained control of my fluctuation sanity and all the indistinct parts of my mind. I became a sort of god, standing above the human mind as a separate being, a collective of all suffering and grief. I was one with the knowledge of why I am and the where I am in the cosmos! It was awesome...for a few seconds. Then the fear of knowing set in. I was afraid of myself, so much so I tried to kill myself repeatedly, even going so far as to stop thinking so my body wouldn't move, but it moved anyway. How I know when I had actively disengaged my thoughts is beyond me but it fucking happened. The force of my own fear attempted to topple me into an inescapable blackness, a total existential nothing. It seemed like I really would die somehow..." Angel leaned in anxiously and awaited the finalizing piece of information that would help her. Then it came in at the same time that another desperate being would use the advice.

"That's when I cracked" Nny continued, his voice stretching out into the cosmos and bounding off of the brightest stars and galaxies. "When I decided the overwhelming force of fear was too much for me to fight against, I embraced it. I used it. I **owned** it. I made fear my bitch, and I learned how to use it. That's when I lost my humanity, not to be found for many, many years. My sanity followed after it, although I still doubt that that's around anymore at all. When faced with overwhelming fear, I have experienced, humans always take a proverbial high road and go into what I refer to as a 'God Mode'. Total id control. The super-ego dissolves. The human's life boils entirely down to what needs to be done to survive, nothing else."

All at once the words started to click, and finally Angel had her way out. She knew what she had to do. She stood up, fists clenched and hair down, silken strands flowing down over her face. She would own her fear and **use it**.

"And if all else fails" Nny said, hopping away on one foot comically, "you can kill yourself!" Angel looked at him with her new serious face and saw him retrieve a revolver. The timid girl part of her suddenly took control and she had to close her eyes. "See you in the cosmos" Nny growled. A gunshot later he was gone. Body, mind and soul disappeared into nothingness. Angel opened her eyes and saw not a trace of her impromptu mentor left behind. No blood or brains or even a scrap of his clothing. He had, once again, eluded existence.

Just then a car came into the park. It came into the park by crashing into a tree, and out of that car where the driver side was covered in terrible blood strutted Yvonne with her bat and haughty glaring smile equipped at Angel. Her prey was unmoving, adamant and ready to fight.


	44. The Fight of Females

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Angel was ready. She had no fear that she couldn't now use. She had something she never had before, and that was confidence. The mystery painter had painted a beautiful mural of triumph on the canvas of her curious heart, and added flames of rage and war to get her ready for battle. Angel was ready. Yvonne was ready as well, but only to kill. Her mind was still as unsharpened psychologically as a broad-edged knife or a boiled egg, but her haughty ignorance to her lack of immediate skill and the fact she was outmatched gave her her own brand of unique confidence. This confidence, to some, would be called idiocy, but to her it was strength.

_Be wary_ Beelzebub warned. _We don't know if it is eye contact or simple concentration that activates her power. If she only has to squint at you we may be doomed._

"Again with the we?" Yvonne whispered. "Do you really think you're that much a part of my team right now? I can handle a simple fight, trust me. You scurry off to a vantage point and try to intimidate her with your ghastly face."

_I will take that as a suggestion_ Beelzebub said, flittering off on diseased insectoid wings _because an insult to me could end up killing you._

_Noted _Yvonne thought. She now turned her attention to Angel, more specifically her torn and somewhat abused glittering blue garb. "Are you scared?" she asked. Angel took a few seconds of stern, unshifting glaring before answering.

"Yes" she replied, "of course. You're here to kill me, and you may succeed. But I know that I have to use that fear to my advantage, or that fear will lead me to my death." Angel parted her legs to shoulder length and threw her arms out to her sides. "If I die, you'll die as well..." Angel suddenly made a thrust with her palms pointed at Yvonne. She felt some kind of intangible sloshing around in her head, an obvious signal that some bad thing had just happened.

"You little cunt!" Yvonne bellowed. "What did you just do!?"

"Our brainwaves" Angel said making trance-like motions "have been synchronized. As long as I remain calm the fluids and chemicals in your brain will be allowed to flow normally. If I panic or lose myself in fear, we will both die of brain hemorrhaging."

"What the fuck!?" Yvonne shouted. "What is this a suicide pact? What if I kill you?"

"Then I will have failed" Angel said calmly "and lose myself to fear. You will die as well."

"But then how do I win?" Yvonne asked. Angel walked briskly away and grabbed a short metal pole that was lying on the ground. She couldn't see, but carved into the metal of that pole, by some other sharper metal, were the initials 'J.C.'.

"Don't you get it?" Angel said, now holding the metal bar up and smiling a white smile under her shaded face. "You don't get to win!" Angel started charing with her pole, a menacing, evil smile on her face. Yvonne was taken aback for a moment, unprepared to defend, but finally snapped back and sheathed her gun. She pulled out her bat and concentrated on her melee fighting for now, blocking Angel's frantic and somewhat weak blows with her superiorly sturdy bat. She could feel her head throbbing.

_She must remain calm_ Beelzebub thought to itself _if Yvonne wants to live. Something must be done._

Despite Beelzebub's chivalrous want the match continued out of favor. Angel became more and more frantic, losing herself more and more to her berserk heat and the fear of death. Yvonne responded likewise, feeling the cool shock in her skull push against the grain of her bone. It was driving her out of her own mind as well, but in a more defensive path. Yvonne finally managed to get caught in a power struggle, one she was sure to win. She gave Angel a stiff knee to the chin, which knocked her back into a curious state of timidness and out of her pain-inducing berserk, then pushed her into a tree. Yvonne wanted to retrieve her gun but the fear of scaring her opponent to death overwhelmed her. She had to kill Angel in a calm state or she too would end up dying.

"I know I can win" Yvonne said panting. "I just need time." So, in the effort of recovering time, Yvonne ran away into the park. No one else was there but she and her opponent, everyone else either gone and sleeping or mad in the streets. Yvonne knew her plan now. "I can use this whole park to my advantage. Then I'll trap her and kill her without her even noticing!" She still didn't grasp the main concept, that she could never win now. Beelzebub promptly started working on reversing that one-sided handicap by attaching himself to the stirring Angel. He assumed the voice of her conscious, one she would take on as reasonable and logical, and began communicating to her.

_Angel_ Beelzebub began. Angel stirred and saw the vision of her current most trusted mentor, a fuzzy outline of the painter form before. _What's wrong? Still unsure about yourself? About your fear!?_

"Of course I'm sure" Angel said. "I'm using my power, my own fear, to win. This way she'll never be able to figure out how to win."

_Why put in such a thing?_ Beelzebub asked. _Why not just kill her outright?_'

"I'm not an artist of blood" Angel said, her voice stirring with confidence. "I am, if anything, a model, and if I can survive this bout I'd like to return to my life without any blood staining my hands."

_What foolishness_ Beelzebub said, becoming absorbed by just the memory of his character. _You're a demon, wanted by Hell for just existing. There is no normal life for you. There is no escape, no real test in this fight for you honor or your sanity. Just kill her and leave._

"I don't want to" Angel said. Beelzebub managed to snap away long enough to gather his information, and he flew back to Yvonne. "I'm...far to scared..."

* * *

_She is not invincible_ Beelzebub noted. _Her fear and Yvonne's are not connected, it is the state of her mind that forces her power. She can manipulate Yvonne's brain fluid at will. The only thing I can hope is that she does not somehow force the repressed memories of Yvonne's childhood back into her mind, else she may collapse and die at the demon's hands!_ Beelzebub made haste through the park and eventually found Yvonne again, hiding on top of the restroom building. He set himself on her head and nested deep within her bouncy hair.

"You're back already?" Yvonne asked. "See if you can do something about my head. That little bitch his killing me with migraines."

_It isn't automatic_ Beelzebub said. _She can control your power. I was inside her mind, I found out how it all works. She can use it remotely at her own will._

"So it's just a bunch of BS?" Yvonne said angrily. "Her dying won't effect me at all?"

_You can't outright kill her_ Beelzebub explained. _She does have your brains linked in a way that your life is shared, but there is a sort of twist to it. You can also share your emotions with her, to a limit. If you can get her to forget about the fight and concentrate on something entirely different, she may inadvertently lift her proverbial curse on you and you will then be able to kill her._

"Then I know just what to do" Yvonne said slyly. She looked around for a moment in vain and decided to use her partner to her advantage. "Beelzebub, go find an attractive or otherwise suitable male for me to...use."

_Why?_ Beelzebub asked.

"There is one thing" Yvonne explained "that can topple nearly any other human emotion...and that thing is lust. If I can get myself hot and bothered, she'll have no choice but to feel the same way. And if there's only one guy to do it with, she'll go mad before she gets angry or murderous!"

_Your logic confuses me_ Beelzebub said _but very well. I will posses whatever man I can find to get himself to you before she does._ Beelzebub flew off and kept to his word, searching all the nearby area he could for a man while Angel stalked through the green park with a neutral sense of self around her. She kept a steady eye out, ready to bat a lash and paralyze her prey, but for now she could not find her killer. Yvonne was patiently waiting atop the restroom shack for a man, hopefully one with well-defined abs and arms and a handsome face and muscular legs and a tight butt, to walk by under Beelzebub's influence.

She waited an hour at least.

_What is taking that fucking bug so long!?_ Yvonne growled internally. Her grand impatience carried itself through the air into Angel's mind, and she imitated her own subdued sense of anger.

"Where are you, you...mean girl?" she said with a scowl. That was as mean as she wanted to get, it seemed, as Yvonne was using much more colorful language than just 'mean girl'. "Wherever she is she must be hiding. This kind of impatience can only come from taking too long to go to the restroom...so she must be in the restroom!" Angel's flawed logic surprisingly delivered her surprisingly close to the area of her target. She made a move for the ladies room and checked under every stall, but found no one. She even opened each stall and checked the ceiling for signs of a presence, but there was none. And now she felt strange in a different way.

"Oh my" Angel said, drooping her shoulders in fatigue. "I feel...I feel so hot all of a sudden. Is it my clothes? Or this room? Possibly both?" Angel left the room and stepped outside but she still felt incurably hot. It was starting to make her curious. "What kind of feeling is this? Is Yvonne hiding in a boiling room? No, that would invoke a feeling of frustration and possibly torture. Right now...all I'm feeling...is hot!" Angel suddenly felt weak at the knees. She dropped down against the wall of the grimy restroom shack and held herself at the shoulders. She was hit hard with an urge to play with herself, and then she saw the metal bar. Her breathing got heavy, her hands acted alone...

"AH!"

...and she hurt herself as Yvonne wanted.

* * *

In the men's restroom, just beside where Angel logically searched for her killer, Yvonne was acting on the most baser of human wants in a stall with some random man Beelzebub led. The alien creature left her in the stall to silently do her work at tempting Angel into madness and assumed his normal form, peering at his surroundings to ascertain a better knowledge of the human men in a non-social gathering.

_These creatures do not disappoint my disgust_ Beelzebub observed. _I can see no words of eloquence carved in the walls, just debauchery and lame comments of brown humor. There is nothing worth seeing and nothing worth writing, but here it is written for some reason. There are also extremely crude etchings of male genitalia on the mirrors. Apparently those are humorous for men to see in such a fashion._ Beelzebub then heard a strange, wet sound from Yvonne's occupied stall that he decided to ignore. He instead continued observing his surroundings as the rhythmic smacking sound commenced with associated grunts.

_If this doesn't send her over the brink_ Yvonne thought as she professionally acted her way through her killing duty _I may have to get very suicidal and convince her to kill herself. I can't exactly top this too many times... _The battle of the 'fairer' sex would rage on, not unlike a teenager boy's genitals during an extremely awkward and inappropriate time at school while he wears sweatpants, but not without its own twists. Instead, let us focus on the better battles than this one...


	45. The Clashing of Metal

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Mort's rampage led him now into a large and artistic atrium. He had his bloody shovel in hand and his hood up, most of his clothing covered and wet with fresh blood. He glanced back and saw the sprinting band of roaring, writhing monsters at his heels and closed the door behind him. He was locked within a safe house for now, but who knows what villainous routes those manic men could take to circumvent the doors?

"Oh flying monkey fuck!" a clawed man shouted. "He locked himself in!"

"Bags of shit!" another cursed extravagantly. "We can't chase him down anymore! There's no way into the Inner Cloister but that single door!"

"In retrospect" one man said, looking at the articulately preserved door, "it may have been a mistake to not ravage this particular area of the church..."

On the other side of the door, Mort was panting for his dear life. It was nothing but a non-stop sprint ever since those men first saw him. "Too many..." Mort said between breaths. "Even I...couldn't fight them all. The winds of fate led me in here, and now I can only feel them stirring about chaotically. Some door is shut that must be opened, it seems. Regardless, I should rest here..." Mort sat down against a column built in the wall and shoved his spade into the solid stone floor. The room was spacious and tall with a high-vaulted ceiling. There was a detailed painting of ascending concentric circles on the ceiling far above, giving the sort of feeling that Mort sat at the bottom of a void he couldn't climb. He then noticed all the circular carvings and patterns all around him, and the floor which had tiles built in smaller and smaller circles from the walls in.

"How curious" Mort observed. "This ancient church has such modern illusionary art. It makes me almost dizzy, like I am staring up and down an endless hole, trapped in the middle. It is amazing the effects this race has in their spare time..." As Mort sat breathing his mind continued to wander, observing his surroundings intently. There was nothing in the room but the room. No loose ornamental rods or tables, just a floor and one door. There wasn't even an exit.

"Strange" Mort observed. Just as he was about to make more meticulous notations everything became...quiet. At first Mort was unable to discern this unnatural hush from the silence only a moment before, but then as he heard the loud wind outside it became clear: the organ from Gore had stopped. The madman was either on the move, or much more likely, he had signaled Mort's successful execution for his men. "...Shit..." Mort cursed.

"HAHAHAHA!!!" some random male voice cackled from within the room. "Oh poor misguided soul, you have fallen into my trap at last!"

"Show yourself, bastard!" Mort shouted, taking up his shovel in anger. "I'm not afraid to bash your skull in!"

"Patience dark man" the voice chided. "You can see me easily if you'd only look!" Mort was confused. He could hear the voice as it radiated from the center of the atrium but he saw no one. Mort carefully considered his options, but decided against moving. He stood back to the wall and kept his shovel aimed outward like a spear.

_If he comes from above_ Mort planned _I can catch his reflection in my shovel. If he comes from the side I will be able to see him. He has no opening on me, no choice but to attack from the front!_

"What's wrong?" the voice asked again. "Why not fight me? I'm right in front of you!"

"Lie!" Mort shouted. "I know you must be using some form of dark magic to conceal yourself from me, and you only want me in the open to kill me! I am not some mindless old coot like you think I am! I'm a naturally born and bred killer with a genius-level intellect!"

"Such credential!" the voice said with false praise. "Unfortunately, none of that can change the fact that you are **impure**."

_Oh great_ Mort sighed internally. _I'm fighting a homicidal racist maniac. How much worse could this be...?_

"You may be a genius" the voice said "but even a brilliant man can fall for a fools tricks, not that I am a fool. I implore you, take a step forward." Mort shifted his shovel down slightly. "I can swear to you on my honor that you will come under no harm at all, at least, not for long." After a careful deliberation and debate within himself, Mort obliged. He took a step forward. Now everything was different. The base of the wall behind him was at least three feet higher. He was standing precociously on a steep slant that led down to a five-foot solid ledge. He saw now that the intricate tiles didn't shrink down in size as they neared the center of the room, they were all the same size. **They were farther and farther away from the first ledge.**

"You see?" the voice said. Mort slid down the rest of the hill and planted his feet on the ledge. Far down the nearly bottomless hole stood a man on a central pillar that elevated out of a total black abyss. He wore a metal plate with eight bars layered under one solid vertical bar in front of his face and a pointed cap of white. His robes were cut away from his joints, providing him with mobility despite the looseness of the shock-white fabric. He was a startlingly realistic representation of what a KKK Klansman would look like in a modern day Holy War, complete with a massive, bloody ax beside him.

"Even brilliant men can fall for a fool's hand."

* * *

Now Mort was at odd ends with himself. _He has given me an obvious advantage in terrain, as I am much higher than him, but that ax makes me quiver from all the way back here. Still, I can't help but think there is something else to this place than just this...perhaps..._

"Now you" the man said, raising the speared tip of his ax from the hard ground and wielding it in a proper two-hand grip, "I cannot in good mind nor faith allow you to find the exit and kill our most gracious pastor. You'll have to die now."

"Is it not considered hospitality" Mort began "to introduce yourself before a fight?"

"Oh yes, of course" the man said shamefully. "I apologize. Of course, I already know your name, Mr. 'The Mortician'. I am Trevor Duncan Dix IV. I am known, in some very private circles, as 'The Ghost of Justice'."

"Justice" Mort began, "or Segregation?"

"What do you know" Trevor said accusingly "about the history of slavery? Southern plantation owner treated slaves like family when they weren't making them work. Besides, if not for slavery, you wouldn't be alive in this country. You owe the aristocratic plantation owners of the mid 1700s your eternal gratitude, son!" Mort shut his opponent up with a loosened tile to the face. Trevor stepped back a few steps in recoil to the surprise hit, then rooted his ax in the ground and regained his balance.

"I don't care about a society's heritage" Mort admitted. "I am here to kill, and that is what I shall do. Now come up here and let me fuck you up!"

"Not a chance, son" Trevor said. He started moving for the steep slope and Mort watched, eager to see what kind of tricks this strange illusion had that could be exploited. Trevor started spinning his ax around his arm, making the rotation go faster and faster as he ran for the wall. Once close enough his ax dug in hard to the packed dirt and acted as a pick, providing a solid grip for Mort to use as he sprinted and hacked his way all the way up to the second ring, standing facing Mort far away.

"Now get over _here_" Trevor yelled "so I can fuck _you_ up!"

"How extremely clever" Mort said quietly. He armed his shovel in a parallel style as Trevor and started slowly moving to the right. Trevor started running to his left, keeping his ax situated on his back like a rack with the blade covering his right shoulder. Mort changed direction and started running away, planning as he ran.

_I understand_ Mort said. _Now that I've gotten a good look, there are nine circles above and nine circles below the entrance level. The walls have seven circles of differing dark hue. This entire place is some kind of twisted, malicious allegory to-_

"The Inferno" Trevor said, stopping Mort. He stopped as well and continued explaining. "Purgatory. Paradise. You are well learned for a man in your standing."

"Another racist quip" Mort growled. "I must say, your wit isn't granting you much variance in your insults!"

"I meant a prisoner" Trevor said.

"Ah yes" Mort replied apologetically. "Well, I did what I could in jail."

"We are in the Inferno" Trevor said. "The only door to this place, the one that will lead you towards my righteous pastor, lies above." Mort followed Trevor's hand, pointing straight up, to the ceiling. Now that he was at a proper angle, he squinted and saw the improper shadows of the paint on the ceiling. It was another illusion. **More steps were carved above.** "It may take you a while to get up there if you can't ascend in a more subtle way, but there is an exit up there if you can survive the pit of flames!"

"How amusing" Mort said. "I suppose you represent some mythical figure of quasi-importance in the greater arch-evil of Hell? Some demon who whips and carved into the bodies of the damned?"

"Nope" Trevor said, setting his heavy weapon on his shoulder. "I'm just a man with a big ax."

"Simplistic" Mort said, snapping his goggles to his eyes and taking a low, anxious pose with his shovel held like an ax. "I suppose there is no part for me, then. Black men didn't exist back then." Both men started running around the second circle at each other. Mort took the given chance to make a plan upon his encounter, still unaware of just how much reach this man could have with his weapon or how skilled he could wield it. Trevor raised the grip of his right hand and took the ax butt in his left hand. He was ready for a huge swing as soon as he was in range. Mort took his light shovel back in his left hand and continued running forward.

"DIE!" Trevor shouted. Mort dove out of the way of the huge, crushing vertical swing that broke the ground and sent a small cloud of dust into the air. Mort threw his shovel into the dirt just behind Trevor and grabbed it, using it as a pivot point to get himself back onto the solid ground behind his enemy. With his shovel still in the dirt Mort resorted to unarmed techniques with his hands out in front of him.

"I think not!" Trevor shouted. He suddenly heaved his ax from the ground and made a thrust behind him at Mort. His large adversary side-stepped the attempted attack and placed his left palm gently on Trevor's neck. Mort wound up his right arm for what seemed like a huge punch. Trevor made a jump forward, avoiding what could have been a spine-breaking hit. Mort smiled. As Trevor turned himself around with his ax in both hands, ready to slice, Mort retrieved his shovel and started forward again.

"Get real!" Trevor shouted. He made a huge swing for Mort's neck with his sharp ax. It was a full sing, the blade settling neatly in the wall of dirt behind Trevor. Mort wasn't hit, of course, as he had ducked down in time to save himself and was now on his stomach. He knew his opponent would recover before he would ,so he attacked from there, making a jab with the spade of his weapon for Trevor's leg. He hit, although lightly, and interrupted Trevor's balance long enough to roll away.

"That weapon of yours" Mort said "is extremely dangerous."

"Why thank you" Trevor said. He brought it back around in its normal grip, holding it proudly with the straight, long cutting edge facing the ground and the long spikes on the opposite side facing up. The whole handle was spotted grimly with dried stains of blood. He even wore gloves with groves and uneven padding to make wielding his monster weapon more bearable. "You weapon has its uses as well, I'm sure."

"Like chopping off your head" Mort said. "Speaking of which, let's get down to the real business here, before the winds change!" Trevor raised an unseen eyebrow at his curious adversary and armed himself carefully. He would not begin underestimating such a dangerous man this far into his fight...

* * *

The men with manly weapons continued to fight in their hellish battlefield while the main target of one man's desire and another's wrath sat watching from and unseen vantage. The nearly invisible cameras in the perplexing room were watching the fight intently. Mort made a swing that missed and Trevor made a huge attack that forced retreat. Mort jabbed his spade into Trevor's armored gut and Trevor kicked the weapon away. Mort grabbed it before it fell but left himself open to an attack.

Mort sacrificed his grounding by rolling down two rings while Trevor wrenched his ax out of the ground again. Mort was able to expertly scale his way back up, using his shovel to almost literally 'dig' his way up. Once he reached solid ground again Trevor made a flying leap that Mort ran away from. The attack chopped a large chunk of the dirt away from the rest of the slop and resulted in a pile of excess dirt on the ring below. Now Mort had an advantage in terrain, but chose not to exploit it. He ran instead to the opposite end while Trevor scaled his way back up to give chase.

"What an amusing fight" grinned the maniac Gore in his secluded place.

"What can we do for you, father?" one weasily man with greaves asked hopefully. Behind him stood the remaining living combatants of Gore's congregation, only a few soldiers who stood ready to fight and most likely die. "Might we be able to help the Ghost?"

"No" Gore demanded, raising his hand from his standing position. "We will let this unfold as it must. I am certain of the outcome. In the meantime, check on the pagans and non-believers. See that they are appropriately punished if they continue to defy us."

"Yes, father" the twisted zealots said with a bow. They left through the door and descended down the dark spiral steps of the Gothic tower at the end of this huge cathedral, leaving their brilliant master to his own devices and monitors in the organ room.

"Yes, I am certain" Gore said. "Certain that our fight will be much...bloodier!" His shocking revelation of distrust, could it actually be true? Will Mort manage to win?


	46. The Shrieks of Terror

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Finally the sky was visible again. The barred windows of dirty glass and cobble-stone streets beyond then seemed to pulsate with a strange energy of foreboding. An ominous, silent force clouded the sky and his glasses. Sam's target was in sight, the municipal Mayoral building of old days, wherein his ultimate bounty sat smiling madly and plotting.

"This will be fun" Sam said sarcastically. He felt a pulling chill at his spine and snapped around. He saw, in a flash, a girly ghost in front of a closet door, then the door opened up slowly. Inside there was, to his great fortune, a Rocket-Propelled Grenade launcher. "Oh" he grunted hopefully. "This _will_ be fun." Sam dropped his extra guns, leaving him with only his sacred killing implement and took up the bazooka. It was dusty, obviously guarded by those ghosts until someone like him came along to silence the madman who ruled this town. Now it belonged to that madman's attempting killer.

"It's about thirty yards" Sam said "from here to there. These things can fire pretty unpredictably, so I need to aim high to hit low. Besides all that, I have no wide area to fire from..." Then he saw the old, wood-carved doors that led outside. With a sigh he walked over to them and opened one to a slim sliver of light. He saw four mutant dogs in the middle of the street, waiting on their butts for him to come out, and through his trained vision of detail he noticed two snipers already poising themselves to fire at the house.

"Shit" Sam cursed. He closed the door again and moved away. There were stairs behind him but his previous encounter with the silent and stealthy super-Doberman dogs had turned him off from the idea of attacking from a higher place. He was just close enough to kill everything he needed with a few shots but as far as he knew he had only one rocket and one clip of sacred bullets. He searched through the house cautiously for some wide window or opening but found nothing he could use.

"..." the air said. Sam sighed and turned tiredly around to see the ashen shadow of a ghost standing in a doorway pointing upstairs. "I checked" he said as a hollow projection of his true self. "Nothing is up there."

"Great" Sam said. The ghost vanished again through the floor with a smile. Sam didn't care. He simply jogged for the stairs and stomped up to the second floor. The windows up here were still bared but not as widely as those downstairs. The bad part about those schematics was that they were nailed down and made of three-inch thick fiberglass.

"This building" Sam said "must have been some kind of bizarre part of the experiment."

"Correct" Gott called from somewhere in the building. "I cannot see you right now, Mr. Killer, but I can certainly hear you. By the sound of things you seem to be carrying a rather large gun with you. Some kind of machine gun perhaps?" Sam ran around and found, in the master bedroom upstairs, an olden-timed recorder with a large brass phone attached to an anachronistic cord in the wall. "Regardless, you are trapped."

"Says who?" Sam asked, prying for more information.

"Oh!" Gott exclaimed. "You are much closer than I thought! Yes, you are trapped. The house you are in was one of my greater testing grounds for breeding genetic insanity. The people were barred from ever going outside or interacting with each other, just on family of three children. Eventually the love deteriorated and the father killed his wife. War broke out between the eldest daughter and her younger twin brothers, but they won and overtook her while the father cradled the severed head of his wife in the basement. The brothers used their sister as a sex slave and eventually killed her, then they both died of syphilis. Tragic, isn't it?"

Sam didn't care and he wasn't listening. He finally found a window he could open and aimed carefully for the front door. The snipers on the roofs noticed the shimmer of his rocket, but the awning of the roof blocked their view.

"Moving for visual" one sniper reported.

"Roger" the other replied over the headset channel they shared. "OH LORD! NO!! AH!!!"

"What's going on, John?" the first sniper asked.

"BEEEEES!" the other shouted in pain. "GIANT FUCKING BEES! EY'RE EATING OUT MY BRAIN! MY BRAAAAAIIIN!!!"

"That sounds retarded" the first said. "John, cut the shit and get into position!" Just then his channel cut off into static and John was heard screaming as he jumped out of a window with a swarm of giant bees buzzing around him. The first sniper squinted in disbelief, then clenched his buttocks in fear as he heard the annoyingly loud buzzing just behind him. He turned around fearfully and started shooting point-blank at the swarm of spiked, evil-eyed bees of death.

"GAH!" he shouted. He was floored and gored in one fell move, all the while Sam made his calculations and the dogs stayed unmoving on the street.

"Now should work" he said. He steadied his aim and fired. The rocket spiraled briefly through the air, flying over dogs and blowing their ears back, and then nearly hit the ground far in front of its target, but its instability made it curve upwards again and it burst through the doors of the municipal Roman doors of the Mayor's building. The rocket sailed on randomly, curving upwards towards the head of a statue in the lobby, and made a roof-shaking explosion that decimated the upper body of blind-justice.

Von Gott was shaken but not too disturbed, as he turned with his crooked grin to the door leading to the main foyer.

"You are an impatient man" he said into his microphone. Sam was already departing, out of range of his target's voice, and kicked down the front doors with a taser in one hand and his gun in the other. "Why don't you play outside for a while with the dogs?" The dogs in question, devilish and evil, were up and ready for a wicked fight, teeth bared and foam flowing from the corners of their stone-crushing jowls.

* * *

"Come my pet" Von Gott said as he left the room to his twisted accomplice. An emaciated frame of a gauze-wrapped human with an elongated neck and jagged, sharpened teeth and skin so damaged that its eyes bulged out unblinkingly started following after its apparent master. "I suspect he will be able to penetrate my outside defenses, so we must secure ourselves just in case." He paced away in his white lab coat and went down the hall with his phantom guardian hovering behind him.

_He is far too strong willed for me_ Gott admitted to himself. _I cannot foresee any major breakthroughs in him, but I have been wrong on the odd occasion. There may be some rare chance that he will listen to my reason and submit against killing me. My experiment is still ongoing, after all. Once I get my prime subjects out of their training cells They will be ready to integrate themselves into the outside world._

As he mused his pet noticed something. The thing twitched its head and then slowly turned it around toward the main foyer. Gott didn't notice anything, but his shock-white guardian started moving in the opposite direction without Gott even noticing. The twisted professor made his way to a vault door and as he opened it he finally made notice of his escort's absence.

"Do with him as you will" Gott said over his shoulder. "I trust in you...inhuman instincts."

Back in the ruined foyer, where the lovely statue had lost its head into a cloud of dust and shrapnel earlier, Sam made his way across the floor with blood splattered carelessly on his suit and a dog's head in his grip. Somehow he lost his taser, but no sky-splitting thunderous shots were ever fired. He stopped a few steps form the statue he blew up and looked up at it. The balance of fairness it held was already tilting and cracking the arm that held it with its shifting weight.

"I'd laugh at the irony" Sam said "if that irony wasn't so bullshit crafted. I'm not killing justice or enforcing it by killing this man. I'm-"

"EEEEEEEEEEE!!!" screeched some terrible thing. The pitch was so daunting that Sam had to cover his ears out of the shock of pain he received.

"Now what!?" Sam growled. The white monster flipped its way down from the upper railing of the second floor and landed on the breaking arm of the statue. The instant of extra weight made it fall off entirely, then the strange thing landed in front of Sam with its mummified presence.

"EEEEEEE!" it screeched, capable of saying nothing else. Sam moved away, sure of himself that this was yet another horrid mutation of human nature run amok, and prepared himself. He tossed the dog head at the creature, momentarily stunning it into a confused submission, then reached into his suit. The creature cowered with its hands up. Sam stopped his motion and kept his hand inside his jacket, fingering the shaft of his hidden Bowie knife.

_What's it doing?_ Sam asked himself. The creature continued to cower, hands in front of its face and knees bent low. _Is it having some kind of...yes. It's a learned response to something in its past. Its creator must have done this, hold a weapon or instrument to punish it with in his inner breast pocket, which this creature remembered and personified whatever it was and the motions required to wield it with fear...Good._

Sam jerked his shoulder forward and the creature flinched with a loud, fearful screech. Sam made a sudden step forward and it retreated several steps back. Sam then smirked and started running at it, drawing his hand slowly out. The creature went berserk for a moment and froze up, letting Sam draw ever closer. He got within stabbing distance when the animal instincts took over and the creature threw Sam away with one stroke of its mighty, lanky arm. Sam wasn't damaged or hurt, just confused and offset by the attack and landed on his feet with his knife out. Now that the creature could analyze whatever he pulled out its demeanor changed. It pointed at the metal blade and started hissing with laughter.

_Great_ Sam internally said with heavy sarcastic cynicism. _Now I've lost its fear, respect, and a chink of my ego. Oh well, I can still kill it with one bullet._ From the ceiling descended dissension. Another creature bound in the remnants of a straight-jacket and belts covering its legs crashed down behind Sam, raised up its long, sturdy leg and gave him a roundhouse that sent him into the broken statue, breaking the rest of it. As he flew through the air the pain of getting kicked so solidly and powerfully in the side forced the gun from his hand, and now he was disarmed. Disarmed and in pain.

"Fucking hell" Sam groaned. The creature duo was trioed by yet another of these monstrosities, this one wearing slightly more human clothing. Its face was still deformedly ugly and its neck extended seemingly up into the middle of its face, but at least its green scrubs and paper shoes were in good shape. This one was also better equipped with two scalpels and a stethoscope for...some reason.

"KRAAAAAAH!" The surgeon thing shouted.

"MUUUUUUU!" the straight-jacketed one roared.

"EEEEEEEEE!!!" the pasty white thing screeched. Both of the other monsters clasped their ears in pain, turned to each other, and nodded. Before the white one had a chance to scream again, they killed it with a tandem kick to the spine and two knives to the throat. Sam managed to regain part of his composure and plan around the new strange development.

_They must have killed him_ Sam theorized _because he wasn't contributing enough based on his battle cry. They knew he would hold them back fighting me, which means..._ Sam reached into his jacket again and made himself known. The two monsters had initial thoughts of fear, but were quick to dismiss them.

"Shit" Sam cursed with a cough. "Of course it wouldn't be that easy. This isn't some kids-story. I'm gonna have to work for this kill..." Sam squared himself against his two ghastly opponents, bot glaring at him with their wide, lidless eyes and clacking teeth. Sam was armed with nothing but some hollow and baseless knowledge, nothing else. Somehow, he would use it.

* * *

Von Gott made his way through a dark, lightless corridor where the sound of terrible, tortured screaming started fading into existence around him. His grin only became longer and more grotesque. His white teeth flashed and illuminated the barren walls around him.

"The fools" he said liltingly. "They didn't understand the greatness of my theories, the substance of my work. The impact these experiments of mine can have, no, will have! Once I am rid of that bother out there I shall move on and destroy the meaning of 'society' once and for all! The huddled and disassociated masses of ridiculous morons and fools shall perish. Only perfection shall remain! I shall answer the most pressing and ancient question, of what the human nature truly is!"

He entered a room, a huge block of hidden cells built into the rest of the village with the surrounding houses as walls and cover for the true gruesomeness of the operation. People, silent and oppressed, sat huddled over themselves in each cell. At least three and at most five to each cell, men and women who did not move. They wore nothing, bare as the day there were immaculately born, and stared intently at the floor. All of them were of peak physical condition. The men were strong and virile looking while the women were dainty and gorgeous to behold. Even the hair was different for every member of this strange place, some women having short and wavy hair while others had pigtailed red hair.

"Rise!" Gott commanded. Every body rose up, spines erect and heads tilted down. "Good morning, everyone." Every head rose up. On every face was a cheerful and painted smile. Every single eye on every single person was the same color of misty green.

"Good morning, Doctor" greeted the entire army of society-ready soldiers.

"Human nature" Gott growled beneath his army's hearing "comes from within, and we are all ugly if we dig deep enough..."


	47. The Mind of Battle

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

The mind of a mentally-ill man is a dangerous weapon, more so than any weapon a normal man can hold. Thomas is a man with such a great ego and so much inherited power that his mind had been programmed from before his birth with a myriad of locks. His full power was almost perpetually locked away for fear of its running rampant ion the field.

It is now out in the open, fighting a self-sentient super-soldier with the exact same genetic make-up with the exception of several strange mutations. A computer was fighting a snake. No, that's not a joke.

Tom began fighting. He mechanically swung his sword around with deadly accuracy while Jormungandr dodged more elegantly than the animal of his moniker. His legs twisted impossibly to find solid grounding and his torso whipped about manically. Both men shared the same face, but only Tom seemed collected in his emotionless state. Jormungandr looked quite more manic as he snaked about. His injured arm couldn't move on its own at all from the slice Tom had given him before, but he still used it as a clawed whip.

"Come on you mess of a man" Jormungandr taunted. "Can't you at least try?" Tom continued advancing until he was where he wanted to be. Then he vanished. Jormungandr looked surprised for a moment, but seeing the large air-conditioning unit right next to where Tom had been wiped the surprise away. He knew what was happening. Sure enough Tom made a leap from the top of the metal box with his sword high over head and made a destructive slash down at Jormungandr's head. He grabbed the sword in the air with his metal claw and threw it away. Tom held onto the sword and landed facing Jormungandr with the sword back in place and his feet spread far apart.

Jormungandr rushed in and tried to stomp on Tom's instep to disable him. Tom kicked his leg back to dodge and made a thrust for Jormungandr's chest. He missed as Jormungandr twisted his chest around once more, but he kept his sword out. He took a step in with his sword-side leg and made a sweep with a snap of his waist and shoulders. Jormungandr could only hope that his ribs moved his lungs out of the way fast enough so he didn't get lethally cut. He exhaled in pain and relief. Tom cut him through the skin but thanks to his body control he missed the organs.

Now Jormungandr attempted his own surprise attack and vanished with ninja-like agility and speed. Tom stood with his sword diagonally to the ground, now lazily near his groin. He stood completely still, not even his chest moving in tune ti his breaths, and waited.

"Target suspected" Tom droned mechanically "in only three areas. 12:00, 12% likely. 6:00, 84% likely. Other, 4% likely." Tom's computerized brain, wizened through years of mental bombardment of video-game reflexes and stratagems of thousands of men and women across the globe, was able to choose between all three choices in an instant for the most likely option. So he sliced apart a nearby metal vent and Jormungandr popped out of it, barely keeping his head attached. "Chance of sneaking through the ducts, 97%"

"Shut the hell up" Jormungandr growled. He flipped away and went out of sight once more. This time Tom didn't remain static. He started moving as fluidly and quickly as he could over and around the various obstacles on the roof, getting himself into position somewhere advantageous. "I was like you once, a blind idiot without a single thought of my own. Everything I was, all that I knew, was simply the product of another man's imagination, and even then it didn't seem very imaginative. I was a moron, fighting based on simulations I had run in my dreams. Pamphlets of gun-assembly guided my life. Manuals of hand-to-hand combat were my holy testaments. I was like you. I was once very sad."

The words hit the surface of Tom's skin and bounced off. As he rounded the corner of another metal box of circulating vents he came upon the manic, animistic Jormungandr ready to pounce from the graveled ground. Tom blocked instantly, expecting his opponent to fly into his sword claw-first, but Jormungandr instead started crawling away. Tom threw his sword into the ground and, within the same fluid motion, drew out his gun to start shooting. The automatic lead spray hit all around the shuffling Jormungandr who crawled and slinked about like a three-legged crab-monster with...claws, grinning and glaring at the robotic Tom.

"You're such a mess of a soldier" Jormungandr lowed. He started advancing quickly, dodging the bullets by painfully twisting himself around and around in the waist and his working limbs. "Why are you even still alive? I was always the good one. You were a defect! A bad egg. They got rid of you the day you were pushed from the mechanical womb!" As Jormungandr drew close and readied himself to pounce Tom expended the last of his bullets on a metal vent. The angle was calculated so precisely and so quickly that even Jormungandr had a hard time comprehending the shot he took to the foot. Tom drew out his sword, dropping the gun in place, and readies himself for close combat.

* * *

As the battle raged on the citizens took a more careful notice of the field on which the killers fought. The scene of immeasurable destruction was no longer the focus of attention, nor was the increasingly unstable and potentially collapsible structure of office floors in front of them, but the raw wrongness that came oozing down form the sides of the building. The terrible feeling that something amazing and terrible was happening nearby. Like the screech before a car crash or the blaring foghorn of a freighter before it plows into the concrete dock and continues on for a few blocks, destroying everything.

"I think I heard gun shots" a citizen noted.

"Everyone!" a policeman called with a megaphone. "Please return to your homes and get away from the building. It could implode or tip over at any second!"

"Screw you, cop!" a young, rebellious man with a trouble past regarding the law shouted. The police mobilized in an instant to spray and slam the young punk to the ground. The only sounds he made afterwards were screams of pain and terrible injustice. The crowd ignored him in favor of the sensation that came over them from the fight high above.

On the roof Tom and Jormungandr continued to clash metal. Jormungandr raked and scratched with both of his clawed hands as fast and powerfully as he could. He threw in kicks for good measure when possible, but robot-Tom's guard was far superior to normal-Tom's. It was difficult to rebound after each swing knowing that the mere fraction of time that Jormungandr was exposed could get him killed at this distance.

"Locking on" Tom droned. Jormungandr instinctively leaped far back and landed with his legs spread far apart and knees to the ground. Tom disengaged his efforts and paused for a moment while he processed his next move. Jormungandr made another leap in and, after only a few swings and blocks, Tom repeated himself. "Locking on."

"To what?" Jormungandr asked. He jumped away once more, this time to higher ground atop a metal box, and growled. "Request processing information!"

"Access denied" Tom droned. He lowered his guard long enough to take his sword hand and flip Jormungandr the bird. "Running temporary setup 'Go fuck '" Tom said. Jormungandr became agitated and decided easily that it was time to attack again. He ripped a chunk of the metal form the duct box off with his claws and threw it at Tom. It was sliced in half. Jormungandr started raking and tearing apart the innards of the machine and tossed them all at Tom in the hopes that something would have a positive effect.

"What are you targeting!?" Jormungandr demanded. "Is it the ground? You're trying to retreat to the lower floors?"

"Negative" Tom reported. He made a flying leap with his inhumanly powerful legs and sliced the box in half. Jormungandr jumped away with his hand helping him to fly. Electricity started sizzling around and Tom jumped away. Then the unit exploded and made a mute glow in the sky. The spectators fearfully stood like sheep and assumed the worst.

"That was your target?" Jormungandr asked. "Pathetic!" Jormungandr looked over at his damaged arm and saw that the wound that sunk down to his bone was now just a mark of flat, searing red. He moved his arm once more and smiled with menace. "My cells have mostly regenerated. I can fight at full power once more. Get ready, Thomas! I'm going to rip out your trachea and shove it through your urethra!"

"Target found" Tom said **from behind**. Jormungandr whipped his head around fully and saw Tom coming int for a low stab at his spine. He spun around so his side faced Tom and made a kick. "Commencing attack" Tom droned. He sidestepped the kick and stabbed through the bottom of Jormungandr's foot all the way up to his lower thigh. The pain almost knocked Jormungandr out. "Target achieved."

_No way_ Jormungandr thought in disbelief. _I was too blind to believe it but now I remember. We, the super-soldiers, were once programed to combat any situation with any possible weapon. I remember this program. He can see routes for killing that no human mind can, he can accurately think ...dammit. I forgot about that. It seems I can't win against a mind that efficient..._

"FUCK OFF!" Jormungandr shouted. He jerked his leg away, ignoring or forgetting the pain, and threw Tom's sword away. His leg was now useless from the waist down, and it would take too long for his healing powers to take effect. He knew what had to be done. Tome knew nothing bu death in his current state, so he set himself up for a combat-oriented pose while Jormungandr dug his bleeding heel into the gravely ground. "We're gonna fight until one of us dies, Thomas. Right here, no stupid tricks or sight-gags. This battle will end, and then there will be peace within our life once more!"

"Threat reassessed" Tom reported. He took a stance learned form ages and hours of information on martial arts in movies that worked. The most deadly martial art ever self-taught by a nerd, used for the purpose of random acts of violence. He stomped the ground with his right foot forward and set his arms perfectly perpendicular to the his torso, making a cross with them and tensing his fingers up to grab. "Resetting A.I. difficulty: Impossible Mode. Prepare to fucking die." Jormungandr was unmoved by the threat, but somehow he couldn't help but take it seriously.

* * *

"Executing ''" Tom droned. He threw a powerful right at Jormungandr's face. Jormungandr twisted his jaw away to dodge it. Tom threw another fist into his abdomen and hit, but the blow hit no organs, just loose flesh and meaty muscles. Jormungandr began to draw his arm back and counter, then he stayed it behind him in hesitance.

_If I were a monster machine_ Jormungandr thought _where would I try to hit next?_ Jormungandr evaluated the possibilities in a flash and stabbed with his fingers straight out at Tom's throat. Tom threw his arm back, reeling his whole body away from the potential blow Jormungandr threw. The metal claw stopped at its longest reach, just away from Tom's throat as it continued backwards, then the fingers dropped down and he sliced down at Tom's gut. Tom undulated his abdomen and reeled his upper body up to deliver a punch to Jormungandr's face. The metal claws scraped the skin of Tom's stomach but he did not flinch.

_Dammit!_ Jormungandr internally shouted. _I was tricked again! How can I maneuver around this logic!? It's like, through deductive reasoning at an inhuman rate, he can see into the future and act accordingly. How do I kill someone who can see my moves before I make them?_ Jormungandr made a few berserk swings with his arms, trying desperately to rake apart Tom's throat or chest. Tom ducked and weaved away like a boxer and threw in open-palm punches like a martial artist. Jormungandr couldn't twist his organs around fast enough and suffered the pain of getting hit in his lungs, stomach and almost got hit in the heart. Tom reeled far back and attempted a haymaker open-palm blast to Jormungandr's face, but as the hand came in Jormungandr caught it and squeezed it.

"It's all useless, Thomas" Jormungandr said. Tom made no effort to retrieve his hand. He didn't struggle at all. Instead he drew himself in by pulling at his shoulder and gave Jormungandr a stern knee to the groin. Then, while he was stunned Tom stomped down hard on the instep of his uninjured leg, effectively severing the tendons of his leg with the bones of his foot. Jormungandr was now immobilized and in such pain that his grip on Tom had loosened to the point where he could draw back both his hands and deliver a double-open-palm blast to the chest.

Jormungandr tumbled backwards into a metal vent and rested their in pain for a moment. Then he saw Tom coming at him again with his arms drawn back. Jormungandr's legs wouldn't work, but his arms were strong enough to flip him away over the vents. He ran away on his clawed hands and waited for Tom to predictable draw close. Then he started spinning as quickly as he could so his feet would whip around wildly. Tom had already started advancing with his hands in front like an animal. He predicted Jormungandr's move once more. However, the next move wasn't so easy for him to dodge. Jormungandr threw himself forward as he was spinning and smashed his head into Tom's face. The force threw Tom onto his back and sent his mind spinning.

"Are you finished now?" Jormungandr asked. "You seem to be getting progressively more annoying as this fight goes on, so I think it's time I took the intelligent route and ended this fight before it goes into ridiculous territory."

"A.I. Increase unavailable" Tom droned. "Processor speed running low. Check for dust...please clean the fans..."

"Listen to you" Jormungandr said mockingly as he clawed his way up to a standing position. "You're already starting to break."

"Activating...bluescreen..." Tom said tiredly. With all his mortal energy expended and no way to continue fighting without a huge boost of sudden adrenaline, his maniacal brain shut down and he passed out. His human consciousness took control once more, meeting all the pain and fatigue that his other self had endured, and nearly passed out again form the pain.

"Do you get it yet?" Jormungandr asked. "You are inferior to me. You always have been, always will be. I am the superior killer, the greater force. Humanity could have stood below me in terrified admiration if you hadn't continued existing in your painfully pathetic way, but now...I guess those dreams of mine are as futile as this fight. The outcome was obvious form the beginning..." Jormungandr started reaching slowly into his assassin's garb for some hidden weapon. Tom was too tired to speak up in protest or threat, so he just sat back and watched as his evil alter self took out a small pistol and held it up to his face.

"My life was worthless" Jormungandr stated plainly. "It was painful and useless back then. Once I found myself as an individual in the world my existence became less of a chore and more of an unanswered mystery. At first it was a pain in itself, living with no real end or meaning, but then I realized just how wonderful the freedom felt...you lived your whole life freely, doing whatever allowed you to accelerate the time and space that would lead you to a sweet death. I had no such freedom. I was built and born to kill. It is all I know genetically, all I can do. Now I can see an end to my life, Thomas..."

Tom's eyes started opening wider and wider as time around him started slowing down. Jormungandr raised up his pistol and aimed it at himself. He stared up into the starry sky hopefully and sternly.

"Now that I am done with this world" Jormungandr said "I will leave it..." Tom felt some hollow breath welling up in himself. A lump of panic rose up to his throat. In a hopeless burst of sudden energy he opened his mouth and shouted out.

"DON'T FUCKING TRY IT, YOU PANSY!" Tom roared. "If you want to die then just you wait, cause I'm gonna kill you're ass!!!" Jormungandr turned slowly around with a smile building on his face, but he refused to lower the gun. The final stand off between Tom and also Tom was at hand, a vicious battle of sheer willpower under the infinite sky of vacant stars.


	48. The Truth of her Past

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

The battle reignited with a painful moaning cough from the cold, night ground of the park. Angel's body was twitching uncontrollably with all the strange new sensations that had just sparked in her brain. The pipe she used was discarded almost fearfully away into the grass so she couldn't 'use' it again. Her mind was swimming chaotically right now, perfectly defenseless.

Yvonne, meanwhile, was using the abysmally disgusting washroom sink to clean her mouth out while the shadowy figure that had been taken away for her battle-plan silently watched her on the toilet seat.

"What the fuck do you want now!?" Yvonne growled. "Get the fuck out of here, you piece of shit!"

"Awwww, yeah" the man moaned. "I love dominatrix shit." Yvonne had had enough. She pulled out a gun and killed the man, splattering his idiotic brains on the back of the stall wall.

"Fucker..." Yvonne growled. She ducked her head back under the running faucet and gargled the disgusting egg-scented tap.

_Yes_ Beelzebub began, _I do believe that's what he was doing in there._

"Shut up" Yvonne demanded. "Depending on her proximity, like you said, the effects would have been tremendous. We need to find that skank and kill her while we can.

_Of course_ Beelzebub said. He transformed with a hissing of smoke from his robes that imploded his entire black form inward and finished as a cockroach. He flew over on noiseless wings into her frazzled hair and waited for her to finish up. She left her soiled overshirt in the stall, staying comfortable with her swollen chest stretching the latex of her undersuit. She ran out of the washroom and spit in the grass, holding her bat in one hand and her gun in the other.

"I'll hunt her down" Yvonne lowed "and yank her fallopian tubes straight out from her vag!"

_How pleasant_ Beelzebub noted. As soon as Yvonne turned around to begin her hunt, she saw her target huddled over herself in twitching mental torment and froze. She couldn't believe that it was as easy as taking a few steps and then playing golf with her bounty-head's boobs. Still, she smiled and prepared to do so, reaching down to turn her miserable target over. Her eyes had been glazed over with pleasure and pain and her mouth was covered in ecstasy drool.

"Pitiful" Yvonne mocked. "I wasn't even trying in there. You must have been a virgin, right?" Yvonne looked over across a trail of curious liquids and saw the villainous pipe with blood at its wettest end. "Oh my god! You are! You are a virgin! So, I guess this means I raped you, huh? Well, I guess as a killer, I deserved to toy with you before outright murdering you rather than waiting to screw your dead body. I don't even get that. The whole good parts would be freezing cold after a bit, and the mangling?"

_Kill her quickly_ Beelzebub suggested _before the guile and confidence of your victory gloating bleeds over into her!_

"Are you mocking me?" Yvonne whispered. "You must love this fucking planet, because if you try to mock me I can garuntee that you'll never get to leave it!"

_It was a friendly suggestion_ Beelzebub said. _Besides, many others before you have tried and failed. Killing me simply cannot happen._

"Because you're a cockroach?" Yvonne asked. Within the confusing dialogue with an invisible entity, Angel regained her consciousness and began to slip away. The twinge of pain came back into her mind, alerting her to Angel's activity. "Bitch! You don't get to move!!!" Yvonne started bringing her metal bat down and smashed Angel's ankle backwards.

"AAAAHHH!!!" Angel screamed effeminately.

"Hurts?" Yvonne said, leaning in to enjoy her target's pain. "Here! Have some more PAIN!" Yvonne swung down and smashed Angel's other ankle into shards. Angel bit her lip and busted it with her teeth. Now she was in even more desperate pain and couldn't stop it. Her mind started to clear up from its previous cloudiness and a new storm of psychic powers came in. She turned her head in a full 180 to face Yvonne with a face of stranger dimensions. The features of her soft figure had suddenly left and her face was covered by a uniformly smooth, webbed skin that showed a translucent pattern of rotted muscles beneath the layers.

"What the fuck...!?" Yvonne exclaimed quietly. Angel turned around on her butt and somehow pounced to tackle Yvonne to her back. While on the way down Yvonne grabbed Angel's thin wrists to prevent her from ripping her apart, if that was indeed her intention, and started kicking and kneeing the girl.

"Let all you pain" Angel started in a mixture of demonic voices "come flooding back to drown you in despair! I'm going to pull the nightmares out of your head and shove them in every open hole on your body!!! GRAAAAHHHH!!!!" The jaw of her horrible mouth opened wide, tearing the fragile skin that covered her face and exposed the swimming darkness of her mouth. Yvonne suddenly passed out and started drifting off into her mad dreams.

_AWAY!_ Beelzebub commanded. Angel looked around in a panic to see where the voice had come from, and as her head drifted to the side a long and lanky arm of black hit and hurled her far away from Yvonne's body. Beelzebub had shed his disguise once more and stood with his taloned feet spread far apart and hands stretched out to his sides. His black canvas cloak hung off his arms like an extended shadow that made the outline of his terrible head stand out even more.

"EEEEKK!!!" Angel shrieked. Her face had returned to normal, her legs now repaired, and she started to shuffle away from the monster.

_I cannot allow her to escape_ Beelzebub noted. _However, I cannot leave this one's side for fear that her madness will overwhelm her...I should help here first, then pursue._ Beelzebub took his long, dark claws and let them pierce harmlessly into Yvonne's psyche. Through those tendrils he managed to view into her mind as the visions of fear passed by like rolling storm clouds...

* * *

The most frightening memory Yvonne never had returned to finish itself in front of the alien audience. From where it had left off previously, the father that had graciously taken in so many children, including Yvonne, had just finished a brutal massacre of all but her and was leering down at her viciously.

"Now we are alone" he growled. "I must admit, I never thought I would reach this point of my madness, but I guess those bastard doctors don't know everything! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!" The young Yvonne was frozen in fear but something arcane was keeping her conscious. Perhaps it was the absolute fear of slaughter that allowed her to continue breathing and watching. Her false father leaned back to breath in and continued laughing madly to the ceiling.

"Ugk" a pained voice groaned. Yvonne's head whipped to its source and saw her eldest sister of sixteen struggling to raise herself up on her one remaining arm and the better half of her leg. "Yvonne, you have to run...forget about helping us and save yourself..." Yvonne squeaked fearfully in response. The father suddenly stopped laughing and stomped over to the dying girl. He picked her up by the hair tied behind her head and raised her up to his eye level.

"You were always a bitch to put down" he growled.

"RUN!" she shouted with all her remaining strength. "Yvonne, get out of here!!!" The father reeled her back and threw her in for a silencing headbutt. After he was sure her nose was broken and the blood started, madness swept in. Yvonne started getting up but the fear kept her pinned down and she found it hard to move. The father took his adoptive daughter's head in both hands, letting his knife drop down to the floor, and started to molest her mouth. She was barely conscious, barely alive, but she could still feel the perverted wetness as it slipped around in her bloody mouth.

"You were always so pretty" the father said erotically. "Even as a baby, I had to restrain myself from doing anything foolish to you. As you grew it got harder and harder, and also more difficult to hold myself back. Now I don't have to worry, do I? Everyone else is dead!"

"Gkkk..." she gurgled. Yvonne fled towards the door but couldn't make it out. The true horror had started. The father took the girl's body and did **wholly unspeakable things** to it. Yvonne was traumatized and remained in her spot until the following morning, quivering perpetually as she watched the disgusting actions her mad father committed. Now he had finished, throwing the long dead, petrified body to the floor and listening to it crack and internally bleed. His smile was back, and now he turned it to Yvonne.

"You're still here?" he asked, finding his knife on the ground. "What a surprise. I would have thought you would flee as soon as you could. Maybe...you aren't that worthless..." He took the knife up and, without even part of a first thought, used it to slice his wrist in a clean and unwavering motion. Yvonne was still clutching the wall in fear and shook violently. "I can't be saved...and now...you can't either. You're cursed, Yvonne, to forever plague others with your pathetic, eternally pitiful existence! I hope you can live with the guilt of living, Yvonne. I won't have to...and in that light, I won't have to live with anything at all anymore! I-!" and suddenly he stopped with a flourish of unfinished thoughts. All the blood that could kill him if drained was now in a puddle.

His body stayed hovering over the floor on its feet, frozen with its mad smile and balanced pose, for several moments. Then he fell with a thud to the floor. For the next several years the guilt weighed down Yvonne so much that she couldn't function. She was a shell of a person. She became mute, sometimes comatose, and the trauma of watching those utterly unutterable things as a child made her have a psychotic breakdown when she started menstruating. The institution staff of her last psych-ward had no choice but to contain her for her violent outbreaks in a mental institute. She was mixed among all the true psychopaths and schizophrenics without real rhyme or reason, which is where her current personality started to emerge.

The claustrophobia manifested itself almost everyday as she was trapped within the small, padded room all the time and could never escape. She stayed huddled in a ball of herself in the corner everyday, breathing slowly so the air would not all get used in her cramped environment. One day, from the memories that Beelzebub observed, there was a panic that persisted outside Yvonne's room for an extended period of time.

"...?" Yvonne curiously wondered. She stared at the door, waiting for something to happen, and then tragedy came. A maniacal psychopath had escaped and was currently beating all the staff attempting to recapture him to death with his bare hands. Now he had busted down Yvonne's door with blood on his broken straitjacket and locked himself in.

"Damn!" he cursed. "Now I can't go anywhere! But, unless they use the outside entrance, they can't get in, and then I can escape!" Yvonne shuddered in the corner and started hyperventilating. "Huh? There's someone in here? Well, well..." The malicious glint in his eyes brought back the memories where her previous adoptive father had that same glint when he first picked up her older sibling. Sheer instinctive panic set in and Yvonne started scrambling around, desperate for a way out of her obvious fate.

But it was all in vain. The psycho caught her in his immensely powerful arms and threw her across the room onto her own bed. He then leaped over and landed on her, hands to her shoulders and legs locking her down.

"Damn" he began "you're pretty well developed for a young girl. How old are you? Fourteen? And with these natural D-cups! Goddamn!" He ripped off her sterile, white shirt and exposed her breasts. "Let's see what else we can do here..." He started ripping cloth apart, hers and his, until they were in the same state of nakedness. Then the torment began. He muted Yvonne with a hand to her mouth and went to work desensitizing Yvonne from her fears. She was paralyzed with fear and dared not move while the whole terror acted itself out...

...but after some twelve-odd minutes she began moving _in rhythm_ with her assailant. She was genuinely enjoying it after a full half-hour. Something had clicked within her mind, the chemical synapses all came together and formed an intricate work of pleasure that canceled out her phobias. Now she was not fearful, but amorous towards sex and after three hours she had locked her assailant down and took charge of the situation...so to speak.

From out of nowhere a team of guards wielding tranquilizer guns came into the room and overloaded the man's body with toxin. Once they reloaded a certain stage of planning had to commence for their plans regarding the girl humping the dead man's lap.

"Should we put her down?" one guard asked.

"She's never been like this before" another guard, this one a nurse with a gun said. "What exactly happened in here?"

"MORE!" Yvonne demanded loudly. Her voice was so powerful and commanding, regal almost, that the men froze out of respect and the women backed away out of fear. "I need more of this! I demand it! I neeeeeed it! Give me..." She started breathing heavily and raised her sweaty, naked body up off the ground. Her eyes ripped through her shady brow and glowered down the men with a piercing sensuality. One man fell to his knees and started undoing his belt on a whim. "Give me COCK!!!"

* * *

And thus the slut was born. Beelzebub witness the rest of her memories, particularly the hypnosis therapy that suppressed (barely) her lustful urges and felt disgusted with himself.

_She contains an odd power of dominance_ he remarked. _However, she does not know how to use it. It was only in a fit of madness that it made itself apparent. She is...much more interesting than I had thought, but the saddest and most obvious truth still bites at me from behind. I feel that her life is being led astray by a terrible lie..._ Beelzebub did the righteous thing and wiped the terrible dreams away while he could. Angel had long ago retreated while the alien was engulfed in foreign memories, and now her powers had waned to a nearly useless point. Yvonne was incapacitated for the time being, and if her condition held true to itself than she would remain as such until the fight would end.

After a careful consideration of his options, Beelzebub sighed and crouched down next to Yvonne's body. He would wait.

_Maybe it won't be so bad_ Beelzebub thought. _To her, being **barren** won't matter so much. So long as she can appease the sexual monster that rests within her she can continue living peacefully...or not. Humans with power are always too difficult to accurately understand._

_The universe is cruel to those who are blessed. So, are they really blessed at all...?_


	49. The State of Existing

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Clashing blades of deadly metal rang through the heavenly room. A choir of goth-rock angles screamed themselves hoarse in tune with the clashing forces of two demon caught in a conflict that would never end. The Ghost of Justice with his mighty, manly ax fought against the Mortician and his shovel. Trevor against Mort in a predestined fight that seemed to never want to end. They fought on the nine levels of Hell, Purgatory and attempted to escalate their fight up to the nine cloisters of Paradise where the door to Gore was hidden.

"HRAH!" Mort shouted. He made several rapid swipes for Trevor's face. A quick run backwards allowed Trevor to avoid the attack, but his ax slowed him down. He jerked his hips and swung his body, hoping the massive mauler would follow through. It lifted off the dirty ground and swung lazily at Mort. Sense lethargy in his opponent, Mort took an advantage and set his shovel into Trevor's serrated smashing-end. He forced the ax to follow through even more so and sent Trevor barreling over the edge of the eighth ring down against a raised wall where the central ninth platform was raised up out of the dirt.

"You're getting tire, aren't you?" Mort asked with triumph. He stood above, glaring down through the black of his goggles, at his winded and weary enemy. Trevor had been swinging exponentially more weight than Mort, and on his body he carried more than his enemy. He was weighed down by all his armor and his arms burned from the motions that carried his mighty ax around the ring.

"Don't get full of yourself son" Trevor growled. He dug the butt of his ax into the dirt below him and propped himself up with it. "I've still got enough life in me to end yours."

"Somehow" Mort said quietly "I doubt that is true." Mort jumped from the eighth ring to the ninth, a solid platform that from a far enough distance seemed to imitate a bottomless pit. The dirt was so hard and compact that it was nearly obsidian and dense as metal. Trevor groaned and threw his ax up, letting its sharp edge impact to the surface and climbed up to the platform."Welcome to the hell of hells" Mort said, holding his arms out.

"Your theatrics are getting stale" Trevor lowed. He brought his ax back up, planting the butt end with a clank onto the heavily packed dirt platform. "So far all you've done is walk around me in a hurried fashion and hit me in the face with your weak, iron tool."

"This tool" Mort said "has killed dozens of men in horrifically gruesome ways. With an ax like that the very worst that could happen is forcefully splattering a man's innards against a wall with the blunt, spiked end."

"Your feeble mind" Trevor began "cannot comprehend the amazing deaths I have delivered with this mighty weapon of mine. A brain with o much clouded haze can only travel through an intellectual world so far-"

"Drop the racism" Mort demanded. "It's getting irksome. Just fight me already!"

"Racism?" Trevor said in an appalled tone. "I am not racist! When between us have racist remarks been traded?"

"Oh, hatred" Mort said with a sigh. "Let me count the ways:..."

"You mistake me" Trevor said apologetically. "I never meant to be racist. My father, now he was a racist man. He was my first killed, so intolerable to me. I could not easily stand his irreconcilable hatred and ranting nature, so I took a hatchet and cleaved his head off of his shoulders."

"Hence the ax fetish" Mort observed.

"Who started you trend" Trevor asked "of shovel-related dismemberments?"

"An infomercial host" Mort said. "I was very drunk, and thusly I was very angry. I wandered blindly into a graveyard where I saw another lost, drowned soul who held an empty bottle of mental-fog in his hand. Although I was drunk, in the years since my memory has pieced every moment back together. I went into a lapse of rage, all the stress and anger of my life accumulating into an uncontrollable focal point, and then I burst out with pure rage! This man took on the wight, unknowingly, of all my sorrow and anger, and with a shovel from a freshly dug grave I ended it all with several blunt blows to his head. Blood sprayed onto the sidewalk, stained the grass and the damp moss of the nearby tombstones. I dumped his body in the graved, covered it up and poured the remains of the alcohol I had to drain away the blood. A clean murder, one which I have yet to be tried for."

"Impressive" Trevor praised. He gripped his ax firmly, energy restored, and got ready to fight at the constant close range of the platform he was on. "I would have otherwise thought a man of your stature, standing and odd humor would have a much more exuberant start in this terrible profession."

"People always tell me" Mort said "that I am some kind of proof. For example, that a bomb is not worthless because its initial explosion is weak. I am one of the most feared men in the country, a frequent 'guest' on _America's Most Wanted_ up until my eventual resignation."

"One does not resign murder" Trevor said in a hush.

"I did" Mort said with a white, toothy grin of malice, "but they just had to pull me back in. No matter how I try they just keep pulling back into this terrible life! It...is amazing!" Mort's voice carried no dread or regret, only a thick blood-lust that bled over into ecstasy. Mort obviously loved to kill, and fighting for his kill was just as fun for him. Trevor saw that infinite, bottomless, seething pit in his dark eyes and had to grin under his metal mask as well. He felt almost the exact same way.

* * *

Metal met metal once again! Finally they were done talking and the bloody carnage started up from the dust! With renewed vigor Trevor took his ax and made light but powerful swings at Mort. Mort took his shovel carefully, blocking with the caution of his only weapon breaking against the constant pressure that hit it. Mort could only block for now. The dirt was too compact for him to get a great enough foothold to maneuver with. With each blow the men slid just inches back and so they were locked in an eternal loop of motion, walking into each other slowly while spinning their weapons.

It looked almost animated, choreographed to a degree, but it was not. These men swung for throats and heads and the ever-fleeting pierce through the chest. With each rotation of their weapons around arm and hand and wrist the speed seemed to increase. A brutal wind started to kick up from the narrow paths their blades carved between each other. Mort could feel the cloth of his coat tattering in the razor winds, and he knew Trevor could sense the dread that one hair movement out of place would cause.

Finally a break in the monotony. Mort deflected one huge swing of Trevor's ax with a boat-rowing motion of his shovel and made a body-turning hack at his throat. The shovel impacted on the metal of his chin, brought down in an effort to block the blow. It still jarred Trevor and made his lose footing, giving Mort a great chance to act. So he acted. He dug his shovel straight into the stony earth below him and kicked it out. The pillar sliced cleanly in half and the broken half fell with Trevor on it.

"How!?" Trevor demanded. _That's right_ he realized. _Mort was using our force to his advantage. The marks our weapons made cut into the solid dirt and gave him space to work with...I should have seen it coming._ Instead he was surprised to the point where his body was locked up. His last conscious movement before hitting the ground was to keep his ax away from his body. Then the blackened dirt of the ninth circle pillar hit him, impacting hard upon his shock-absorbing metal armor. He was incapacitated for a time, giving Mort the perfect window to do whatever he pleased.

"Destiny parts us" Mort said, looking upward. In the black light that shone through his goggles he could see the wind, invisibly dancing around the highest circle of Paradise above. "I wish you a good Hell, Ghost of Justice. May eternity smile upon you and deliver righteous blow after debilitating, spirit-wrenching blow in the deepest pits of nothingness!" Mort started ascending, using his shovel in a digging motion to climb the steep walls to the Purgatory wall. Then he pondered almost visibly how the fuck he was going to get all the way up there.

"Now..." Mort began "there must be some diabolical trick to this as well. Perhaps some shelves carved into the rings I can duck in or under and climb like a ladder. Damn. If only I could ask Trevor what to do, but he wouldn't tell me."

"So sure about that?" Trevor's voice called. Mort turned around and looked down. He was spinning his ax around, crossing it from side to side and digging it into the dirt in front of him to ascend quickly, much quicker than Mort had gone previously. "I can tell you easily."

"Then why don't you?" Mort asked, preparing for his enemy to come straight at him with the his mighty ax.

"What fun is that? Trevor asked. "You and I are the same kind of killer, Mort! We practice our trade for sheer, unattainable FUN!" Trevor reached the top shelf of Hell and swung straight into Purgatory. Mort leaped high over the ax and dug his shovel into one of the ornately drawn lines representing the levels of Purgatory. He found the line to be oddly soft, considering the rest of the wall was so firm and solid.

"Fun isn't my current concern" Mort said. "I have a job to attend to."

"Funny" Trevor began "what such strange things there are in this world. In one day a man can find things previously thought to be impossible and then dismiss all he held true. In a single flash of existence a man can either renounce himself to the world as a reborn, enlightened mind of science or he can shout out the names he had read so many time sand testify! **TESTIFY!**" Trevor climbed up, jerked his ax from the wall and let it spin over his head. The spiked edge hit the wall and shook the whole room.

"Absurdity" Mort said, clinging to his shovel. He pulled his massive frame up, stood on his shovel and dug his fingers deep into the soft, red lines above him. Then he kicked his shovel up and grabbed it with his free hand. "The only thing you and you 'church group' can associate the world with now is the ridiculousness that inhabits it!"

"But that's all there is!" Trevor declared. "In a world where the rich only get richer and the poor get nothing, a world of such blatant inequality, a world where segregation at a time was viewed as _constitutional_, what else can we attribute the world with but the rampant, nonsensical weirdness that drives our very lives!?!?!?"

"Adapt a nihilist standing" Mort said. "Trust me, everything will be simpler." _Wait a moment...absurdity, weirdness...is he hinting at something? This room itself seems to defy normal dimensions. Perhaps...if I abandon my own reality...through meditation I can reach the door..._

Mort breathed deeply and stopped his rapid, rushed ascent. Trevor looked up on the wall and saw Mort **standing on it,** parallel to the floor itself. Mort rested his shovel on his shoulder, somehow keeping aloft in the air along with his body, and started to think. He separated himself from reality and its ties, and before he knew it the winds changed drastically in his favor.

"Good job" Trevor commended. Mort opened his eyes and saw the monstrously armored murderer standing on the wall, ax leaned against his chest, getting ready for a sarcastic applause. "I was wondering how long it would take a genius to solve an simple riddle like that."

"You weren't very helpful" Mort said, standing up. With reality behind him and the final door a quick run away, he took up his shovel and prepared to do the only honorable thing left: he would kill the Ghost of Justice in cold blood, then he would leave. Only then would he leave. "Come. Life for you is over."

* * *

"So cold" Trevor said with an honest shivering breath. Mort started pacing to his side, making hopping strafes while keeping Trevor dead on his mobile center line. Trevor moved in a stomping, marching gait with Mort, making sure he didn't get too far away and leave himself open. With reality behind him Mort found a new speed and grace on the solid wall. He made a dash, his feet not touching any of the stone and mortar wall, and stabbed with his spade at Trevor's masked face. Trevor hadn't predicted Mort flying and got a sharp blow to his face as a result. Now Mort was on the offensive, hovering just above the rounded cylinder wall his opponent stood on.

"This is the result" Mort explained "of training outside the grip of reality, in a misty world that borders ours. Have you seen the back of my coat?"

"When you ran away from me, yes" Trevor answered. "Is it really that significant?"

"It is to me" Mort said. "That symbol on my back, the eye in the hand, represents the ultimate prophetic freedom from my human life. It is the ever changing will of the universe that guides my shovel into the skulls and chests of the lesser men in this world. It is the mark of 'Fate', a shifting prophecy that hold me to the center of existence."

"In other words" Trevor said, catching Mort's incoming attack with the spiked edge of his ax, it is your cross, right?"

"Better than a cross" Mort snarled. "It's the face of my own, personal Jesus!" Mort threw away his shovel and by attachment threw away Trevor's ax. They were weaponless now, aside from Trevor's armor and Mort's powerful, bare fists. Mort flew over and stomped hard on Trevor's instep, the arch connecting his leg with his foot. It paralyzed him and the pain brought him back into the wicked reality of his impossible stunts. He felt gravity pull at him for a moment, but a harsh, strong left hook from Mort gave him the boost to continue floating on the wall like he was. Mort proceeded to pummel at Trevor's hidden face with such raw power, hatred and vindication that he went temporarily blind in his fury. His fists were little more than dark blurs wrapped in bloody purple garb, impacting and denting what was once a copper-colored surface. Now the slits of Trevor's facemask filled with blood and started gushing with the juices form his mouth.

_He is astoundingly strong_ Trevor thought as Mort finished imploding his face. Mort leaned back and delivered a debilitating punch straight into Trevor's shielded solar plexus. The force of his punch traveled straight through the armor and blew apart his lower sternum, shattering the bones into his most vital organs. _Truly...this man is worthy to be a godly figure...if I could for words in my shattered mouth, they would most certainly be 'I salute you, son. A job well done'..._

Things got black at that moment. Trevor fell dead through the air and fell on his ax. The bitter edge of his cleaver cut of his head and let it roll down the battlefield of Hell while Mort simply floated down and landed on the floor with a sigh. He recovered his shovel, looked around him, and then gave a heaving, breathless sigh.

"Shit" Mort cursed, looking up at the ceiling. "How...the fuck did I just do that again!?" While Mort gathered his thoughts and tried to piece the last few seconds of his fight together to find a way up, a short and soft applause rang out from high above. It echoed far down below, and Mort smiled. "That's enough now, Mr. Trevor. Your praise is not wasted, but ill-used on me..." Mort is victorious...for now.


	50. The Sound of Defeat

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

"KRAAAAAAAHH!!!!" shouted the surgeon.

"MUUUUUUUUUU!!!!" bellowed the maniac. The fresh corpse of their malformed comrade laid bleeding and gushing on the floor behind them, their exposed teeth stained with his glistening blood and guts. Sam felt a tad discomforted by the barbaric display these creatures had put on, but his mind of killing was adamantly focused on one thing right now.

_Fucking flying monkey shit_ Sam exasperatedly cursed. _What the hell do I do here!?_

"MU!" the crazed one, hereafter referred to as 'Cow', snapped. It started running forward, its arms bound by the short scraps of dense fabric that remained of its extra-large straight jacket. Sam started retreating with measured hops, keeping his feet in the same general position, and kept his eyes focused not on his encroaching enemy but the other more dangerously armed freak. The surgeon, hereafter referred to as 'Crow', was standing and glaring Sam down with its muscular brow furrowed with hate.

_As long as it's just one_ Sam planned _I think I have a chance._ Sam tried reaching into his pocket, not to get a weapon, but to measure the creature's reaction. No change. Cow was still fucking crazy and screaming at him.

"MUUUUUUUU!!!!"

"Well shit" Sam said. He had measured his steps correctly and made a leap backwards. He spun around and planted his feet on the wall, then kicked off of it and flipped straight over the charging thing. Cow tried to stop itself but its momentum was too great and it collided into and then through the solid stone wall. "Monster or not, when your bones break and your muscles tear you can't move them anymore, and then you'll lose."

"KRAAA!!!!" Crow roared. Its graveled voice told Sam that he was closing in, and the sight of a sprinting green body confirmed those thoughts. Crow was close, far too close for comfort, and made a jump in Sam's direction with one of its knives held in a vicious under-grip stabbing motion. Sam made an expert combat-roll away, leaping onto his arms and then rolling over his back to settle back onto a foot and a knee. Instinctively he held his arms up like he was gripping an assault rifle, years of training shining through at the opportunity. The motion just reminded him that he was unarmed and made him get up on the balls of his feet to sprint away.

"I need my gun" Sam told himself. Of course he knew that, but he needed the reminder anyway. Cow pulled himself out of the wall with little but scrapes and scratches. Crow was angry as he pried his sharp knife from the tiled marble floor and glared over at the retreating Sam. Sam was running toward the broken statue in the center of the foyer, the last place he knew he gun would have gone. As he ran, something caught his attention. The strange movement from the smallest space he associated now with sheer aggravation rather than fear. A ghost had come up only to vanish a moment later, attempting to guide him to his goal.

"Fucking..." Sam cursed.

"KRAAAAA!!!!" Crow roared. It was running again, much faster than Sam was, with both knives ready to stab. Cow started lumbering forward as well, its whole upper body moving out of step with the motion of its legs. Sam didn't dare look back. He was focused on one spot so he could face his enemies fresh and deadly. Sam finally made it and dived behind the crumbled statue, hoping to scoop up his gun in mid-roll, but he could not find it.

"Shit" Sam cursed. "Where is it? What the hell? Did the ghost steal it?" Sam heard Crow come sliding in, its feet kicking up rubble. Sam turned around in his crouch, his arm drifting slowly downward to his foot. Crow looked at his arm in alarm and nearly froze. In that increment of time, Sam retreated with another combat roll, picked up a piece of rubble from the ground, and tossed it at the monster's face. When he stopped he felt the floor shaking hard behind him and knew what was happening. It stopped suddenly, Cow raising its long leg up for a dropping ax kick to shatter Sam's body. Sam shot up to his feet and jumped away at once, dodging the kick that broke through the flooring and made a crater in the harder foundation beneath the stone tiles. As he flew, Sam looked to the side and saw a partially grinning Crow coming in with its own jump to intercept Sam's body.

_I guess I'm fucked_ Sam figured. He tucked into a ball and started rolling through the air. With his legs tucked in he knew his torso was safe from getting hit, but his back was exposed and he knew a single hit on it would be fatal. _If I had moved a bit faster I could have won, or at least survive a bit longer...oh well. This was a fun game for the length of time it went on. Maybe in the next life I'll learn to dodge better, or something..._ Unseen by Sam, Crow had stopped dead in mid-air, eyes wide open (they're lidless, he can't help it) and jaw far down in fear. Sam's hands were close to his feet in his tucking roll, and when he landed and rolled for a few rotations he got out of his roll, keeping his hands down near his feet in a slouching crouch.

".................." No screaming. Both of them, oddly, were utterly stunned. Sam realized this reaction and analyzed his current position. His hands were near his shoes, fingers almost slipping into the open sliver of his otherwise tight Italian leather works of art. He watched his enemies closely as he slid his fingers into his shoe, and he watched them cower to the point that they lost their balance and fell over on top of each other.

"This just got stupid" Sam said. He started walking over, keeping his fingers in his shoe, and prepared to kill...

With his amazing swiftness it was over. The creatures had a Pavlovian response to his motions and were paralyzed with total terror. Sam used this to his advantage by stealing the scalpels from Crow and slicing off his head. Then he took those same scalpels, jabbed them into Cow's eyes and just let him run rampant. Everything would end for the giant freak soon enough. Now, Sam attended to his more pressing task of locating his target and opening a new hole in his head, namely by blowing his head apart with the gun he recovered.

* * *

"He's a dead man" Sam said, checking his gun over and over again like it was an obsession or neurotic tick. "He will no longer live after I find his ass and vaporize his face. He's dead. He's beyond dead....beyond life." Sam continued walking through the hallways, trying to find some scrap of presence left behind by the demented man. Suddenly, a screeching beep followed by an almost silent breathy growl surrounded Sam. He noticed the growl above the squeal of the building-wide hidden PA system and noticed its proximity. It was the growl of one of those demon dogs, those hell hounds, those beats of war let loose into the small world with the sole intention of ripping apart all that was living with their powerful jaws. They had stealthily made their way into the building and were staying close behind Sam, covering their own sounds with those of the building around them.

And Gott was giving them ample sound to use as cover.

"As a scientist" Gott began preaching to his coming killer from parts unknown, "I have always yearned to push through the envelope of ethics and the border of painstaking research for the ultimate results. I have always wondered the answers to unimaginable questions, all of them pertaining not to the grand scheme of the giant universe but of the smallest measure of reason we humans have. I have always ached to discover the roots of our knowledge, the origin of fear and joy and sadness and pain. Oh, how I have longed for the day when all my questions will be answered! Sadly, I am old now, and the grand reaper of my benefits is here to whisk me away prematurely into the overly hyped void of non-existence. Woe is me...or maybe not..."

_Shut the fuck up_ Sam internalized as he stalked the halls quickly. _I don't care about your plans, your dreams, your ambitions or your fucked-up origin story! I just want to kill you and get out of here!_

"The question of the day" Gott began "is this: is basic human psychology, emotions and action, a natural phenomenon or something born of society? The great debate of 'Nature VS Nurture', a quiz set about by the greatest thinkers of the past and elaborated upon by the spineless cowards of the present. They do not dare to attempt what I have already crafted. What I am dawning here is the forbidden experiment that will answer everything once and for all! My plan-"

"I don't care" Sam droned, now springing through the halls to outrace the devilishly fast dogs.

"-is to take the inhabitants of one city, the one I believe that you have come from, and replace them with my own army of society-resetting clones. They will take over the economy, the politics, the culture; every asset of the city that makes it a city and a meshing ground of race and thought! They will not separate their lives but combine them into a huge working group meant to make society perfect and ideal through and through! Other cities and towns will see the progress this one city makes by banding together and follow suit to become the same mind and body."

"Soon" he continued "states, regions, countries and continents will be working from the example that I have set. Then, with the final beating of my own heart, my perfect city will stop. All of the citizens I have made and the children they have will immediately cease function and society will be without its picture-perfect example of idealism. Then the experiment will commence, for what happens afterward will determine the answer that I will have searched for for so very long. If the world continues to exist, then human nature is not without its adaptability and individuality. The people will have built their changes into their very nature. If the world crumbles down into ruins and destruction, the example I built and tore down will have been the sole guiding force behind the universal order and it will prove that humans require nurturing and examples to even simply exist by! Is it not so exciting!?"

"No" Sam shouted. "It's not." Gott turned around, so caught up in the visions of his speech that he didn't notice Sam right behind him with a shining glare coming off his glasses. His gun was aimed high, right at Gott's mad-grinning face and his wide-open eyes. "In fact, it's pretty damn retarded." Just before the gunshot, Gott pushed a button which opened all the cells. An army of cloned soldiers, ready to move out in their strangely retro 50s style garb, started marching out just in time to see a giant blast of wind grazing over the face of their beloved creator. The bullet was drilling and smashing into Gott's forehead and twisting his skin as he flew far back and then started drifting down.

"He'll be fine" Sam said, looking down the seven-story drop where Gott was heading. The clones had already surrounded them with their creepy stares and smiles, staring him down and stirring the air with their passive eeriness. "I can't say the same for you all, though. I can't tolerate minions like you, trying to outnumber me and fight without any skill or strength. Strategy like that pisses me off." The bizarre beings all took a long step back and opened up a short gap that exposed the wide-open door Sam had initially intruded through. Seven dogs, possibly more from the angle Sam was seeing, were glaring him down from across a long hallway. "Ah, shit!" Sam growled. The dogs abandoned their reason and started sprinting. Sam was more aware of the discomforting breath that was biting at his neck from the army of cloned strangers, and even more aware that it would take all the bullets he currently had to dispose of enough of them to make it out safely. He had no choice but to fight with out his gun and instead substituted it for his combat dagger.

* * *

"Hi doggies!" a young woman with an overly cheery retro accent greeted. The dogs ignored her, her stench too misleading for them to register as food or a threat, and kept running. Once the alpha dog, leading the pack, got close enough, the girl made a swift upward kick with her knee-socked leg and sent the dog's skull crashing into the metal door frame with a sickening crack. Blood sprayed out from the top of its skull and splattered into the girl's already blood-red hair. Her face was stuck in an innocent smile, making her acts seem even more brutal and harsh. The other dogs tried to stop but the rest of the clones were moving to join her.

"Such cute dogs!" a wavy-blond haired girl said, grabbing one by the neck and breaking it with a jerking of her fingers.

"They must be part poodle!" a man with a sweater tied around his neck said in a snooty accent. He planted a foot and kicked into a dog's chest, literally piercing its tough hide and shoving his heel into the beast's organs until it stopped whining. The other dogs were starting to get the idea and moved to retreat, but the clones were ravenous. They rushed in, eyes lifeless and straight, to rip the monsters apart. Sam was at an utter loss for words.

"It hurts, doesn't it?" Gott asked in a loud, echoing shout.

_Oh, fuck no!_ Sam thought. He looked down, barely seeing the movement from far below. His bullet was crushed and compacted from pressing against Gott's demonically reinforced skull, and the offending doctor was lying against a wall with more than half of his body broken and crumpled up like a ditched piece of paper. His bones were jutting out from his skin and formed points in his clothing.

"Your ego, that is..." Gott said, smiling evilly. Sam wanted to react, he really did, but the shocking grip of umpteen clones had paralyzed him. They tackled him and grabbed him in several inopportune places, holding him down and restricting his movement entirely.

_Shit! _Sam cursed. _I can't move! These things are way too strong. They..._ he looked over, hoping to see a knife in his hand, but instead he saw the handle of his dagger where the metal had been bitten off by one of the males who had his wrists locked down in a bear hug. _...what the fuck are these things?_

"Evolution can only get us all so far" Gott continued, somehow drawing closer. Eventually he came into sight, ascending a set of stairs that were built out of his imagination. He floated closer, taking short but steady steps straight into Sam's face. "Sometimes the hand of God can be out maneuvered by the slight-of-hand of any willing trickster or professional. I am a professional at cheating the plans of God, Mr. Killer. Tell me, what is your expertise?"

"I'm a businessman" Sam answered flatly.

"But not a murderer?" Gott asked. "Tell me then, why are you out to kill me with no appropriate training?"

"I was a solder before I went to college" Sam said. "I have more experience killing men than you have making them."

"Oh" Gott hummed, "I doubt that, sir. Come now...why don't you take off those dark glasses so you can really see the fruits of my amazing labor..."

"I'd rather not" Sam said aggressively. Gott reached down to Sam's face slowly, all the more to taunt his inability to move, and slipped off his glasses. When he did and looked into Sam's eyes, his smile widened almost up to his ears and his eyes shot wide open, more so than they ever had before. "My...my..." he said in amazement. "What an interesting specimen _you_ are...Mr. Killer..." Sam grit his teeth and bared his fangs in terror.

His secret was now...exposed.


	51. The Ballad of Losers

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

"What's this?" Jormungandr said mockingly. "You'd rather die in my place? How kind of you. After all, one of dying won't make a difference if **another can continue to exist...right?**" The dilemma of a clone, someone who has no identity and has fought hard to make one now is faced off against his lesser, a man who defeated him with the fail-safe he had already eliminated. Thomas Quindale, real or fake, has survived, and the nihilist tendencies of a worthless being have taken over the true assassin's mind...

"Neither of us should die" Tom defended. "I don't think you've done anything besides try to exist. I mean, I don't know about what you've gone through in life, but I can understand it from a third-person perspective."

"More video-game banter" Jormungandr sneered. "Honestly, Thomas, sometimes a schtick should die."

"You lost yourself" Tom began "when you discovered the truth about yourself. When you became aware that you were just one out of many, you went mad and developed a substitute personality to give yourself meaning. Am I right so far?" Without moving the gun from his temple, Jormungandr nodded. "Then you can't kill yourself just because I beat you! It doesn't make sense!!!" Jormungandr grinned, baring his fanged teeth to the immobile Tom.

"So?" Jormungandr asked, lowering the gun and shooting the gravel around Tom's face. The fearful child in Tom took over and he shut his eyes tight. The adrenaline that pumped in his body relaxed his bladder and urethra, forcing him to piss his pants in sheer terror. Then, when he discovered he was still alive, the blood began pumping straight through his arms and he was able to pull himself forward about half a step. "Plenty of things don't make sense. You, for starters."

"What doesn't make sense" Tom began "about a gaming-nerd who happens to be a super-secret cloned super-soldier?"

"The fact that you were **perfect**" Jormungandr pointed out. "If anything, my suicide should be a relief from your burdened shoulders. One less nemesis once you win the game and go into the real replay value of your life...that's the correct term, isn't it?"

"Just because I won?" Tom said shakily. "Is that the only reason you want to die? Because I won? You're supposed to be a super-soldier, right!? You can move around and even taunt me! Haven't you won already!?!?"

"Nope" Jormungandr said flatly, "because of how I got in this state. Look at me. I'm technically missing two of my limbs. They're useless. I may as well chop them off and wait for them to regrow."

"Can they do that?" Tom asked curiously.

"Probably" Jormungandr said uncertainly. "I've never tried it before, but I think its in our genetic code."

"Our!?" Tom said, now serious and outraged. "Quit comparing me to you! I'm not you! Even if I am, I'm nothing like you! I'm a normal person, dammit!"

"Exactly!" Jormungandr said with mad enthusiasm. "That's exactly why I have to do this!" He had obviously caught the sullen Tom's attention now. "For a perfectly crafted being like me, losing to anyone would mean certain doom and disappointment, but to you? A basic clone who I know from birth was inferior in training? All of us, all of them rather, had intense military training for the first few years of life. You were the absolute perfectly recreated image of the subject, an unsung war hero who almost single-handedly fought off an invasion of Nazi-zombies in an abandoned German war infirmary. You still look just like him...but you could only accept the basic programming."

"Huh?" Tom grunted. "That sounds...really cliched."

"It's all true" Jormungandr said. "We were all instructed to act on free will after so much training and created a magnificent team dynamic. You could only do what we all knew as basic instincts. Like sending a stay-at-home dad out to war and removing all his human emotions. You could aim and shoot and that was it. You couldn't execute advanced tactical maneuvers, you couldn't coordinate offensive movement in response to defensive movement...you were a retard. So, like any good warrior society, the project abandoned you and reset your mind. Somewhere deep inside your brain those programs survived...and imagine my surprise as a highly intellectual soldier with well over a decade of fighting experience and research when I was beaten by the retarded good-looking fuck-off!"

"WHAT!?" Tom shouted in alarm. "You're calling me a retard...with a gun pointed to your head!? You fucking EMO!!!!!"

"Say whatever you want, Thomas" Jormungandr offered. "I could care less right now. Every day of my life has been a pain in my ass. The constant need to survive by surpassing an ever-accelerating world, the threat of knowing someone somewhere still wants to kill me, and as of last month you topped my list of anxiety-attack inducing annoyances. Why can't you see it in my eyes, Tom?" Tom looked up angrily and stared into Jormungandr's eyes. He saw nothing at all, just the empty and shallow pools that resonated with the calculating cold of a killer's mind. The eyes of an emotionless soldier, one who was born to kill and lives only to die...

"See what?" Tom asked.

"Exactly" Jormungandr said. He pressed his gun tight against his temple, placed his finger fearlessly on the trigger, and closed his eyes with a peaceful grin. "Farewell...my brother." Tom wanted to react and stop him from doing it, but he couldn't. There were so many questions to answer, so many leaves floating in the breeze, so many fucking things still high up in the air...Jormungandr was no longer one of them. His life fell from the high tower with a low percent of his brain-matter after the bullet blasted his head apart. His life was gone. Everything about him was dead. He could no longer talk or breath or move his slithering flexible body.

He was dead. The only thing linking Tom to any credible source of power was dead, his only source of acceptable being in the world was dead. And Thomas, despite being victorious, felt burdened by that death...

* * *

Through the streets the demure Angel ran. Tears streamed from her eyes, tears of fear and uncontrollable fear. Her short, sweat-stained hair blew in the cold city wind. Vagrants turned away from her out of strange, instinctive fear.

"I did it!" Angel shouted as she ran. "I made it away! Now I..." She slowed down suddenly and stopped at the curb of a barren street. She felt herself go limp with worry and backed up to lean against the glass of a store window. "Now what can I do? I'll still be hunted, and by stronger people now, if I continue to live..." Despair overcame her, and the peace she had fought so hard for was shattered as she began to cry hysterically. Minutes passed on the lonely streets. Eventually all the lights dimmed down and the bright moon and swirling stars overhead cast playful shadows no the mailboxes and worthless trash that littered the streets. These shadows swarmed around her, though through her eyes she could not see them, and formed a new image of a man walking. Angel finally noticed the darkness around her and wiped her eyes dry.

"Huh?" she grunted. All around her the shadows coagulated into the same shape, and a hundred-fold men made of blackness were walking in the streets. "What's this? Who's there?"

"If you don't like life..." the painter form before said... "kill yourself." The shadows formed a single huge one in an instant. It crawled up the side of the building like a monster and remade itself into his own bust, skinny at the neck but wide a the head, with his gloved hand in a gun motion at his temple and a vicious sneer of dim white shining through the blackness. "Trust me. It always works!" Motionlessly his lips moved and two bright, white moons formed in the total black sky. Angel was pulled from the city streets and into the cosmos to view the giver of her hope blasting his head into a myriad of slithering, dancing shadows that flew into the starry light and vanished. It was breathtaking.

Then she woke up. At first it was calmly, like the gentle woman she was, but then she was startled all at once. The brightness of the real city street came to her like a punt to the cunt and she was wide awake at once.

"Have a good nap?" a conglomeration of frightening, breathy voices asked. Angel turned her eyes forward and saw a stretch limousine with a man in patched clothing wearing a top hat over his face standing front of it. "I hope it didn't ruin your internal clock. You'll be going in for a loooong sleep, now." The man tilted his hat up and placed it upon his head, revealing the multicolored skin of his demonic-stitched face. Angel should have been scared, her reflexive powers should have taken hold, but she was calm. After assessing her situation in full for a moment, the shaking in her hand ceased and she accepted the truth.

"Perhaps" Angel said confidently, "I will sleep in the car on my way?"

"If you wish" Remsius, the demon, said with a hand to his tuxedo-ed chest. He opened the door politely, and a tantalizing scent wafted out. Angel ignored it and walked into the funeral cab prepared just for her. There was a hand mirror on the floor in front of her. She picked it up and beheld the horror of her Hell-given face.

"Next stop" Remsius said, shutting the door quietly, "home..." Once the door latched mechanically, Angel gasped with pleasure. Her face was just as it should look: **beautiful.** It had been so many years since she saw her real face that she couldn't help but weep over it. She ran a careful, almost frightened finger over her fair skin and was astonished by the truth. Smooth as silk, not frail and webbed, not cold like a corpse or rough like dirt, just fair and pretty skin.

"Thank you for your cooperation" another mafioso-clad demon said within the same cab. Angel hadn't noticed but he sat right across from her in the elongated passenger cab of crimson color. This demon seemed to be quite large, with thick arms and a barreled chest, but his entire face was covered by a frozen molten mask of lead. "Before you are returned into the system of reincarnation, we have a special task for you." The demon reached into its black coat with its huge hand and pulled out a small envelope. It stretched its arm beyond dimension without moving its torso at all and handed it off to Angel who took it cautiously.

"What do I have to do?" Angel asked politely.

"I don't know" the demon said as it melted away into the furniture. "I'm but a messenger." The demon vanished as it bubbled into the leather upholstery. Angel was put off a bit by the mystery that had just been handed to her, but she knew peace would not come to her if she did not comply.

"Now that I've killed myself" Angel began as she sliced the letter open with her fingernail, "what adventures will await me?" She pulled out the folded paper, unfolded it, and began reading in the demonic scrawl. Remsius, driving, saw her face become pale as her eyes went further and further down. His only reaction, as an evil monster of course, was to smile at her mixed feelings, and as a dutiful demon his only goal right now was to drive through the darkness and back into Hell...

* * *

Angel's departure didn't go as discretely as the demons behind it had originally planned. Of course, even Senor Satan couldn't have planned the arrival of Beelzebub the Alien nor could he have predicted his myriad of otherworldly abilities. Beelzebub did indeed sense Angel's apparent death, but he was far too busy dealing with restructuring the mental blocks of Yvonne's mind that had been so callously broken to give chase.

_She will be sore_ Beelzebub noted, _but at least this way she can go on living. One loss will not be the end of her life, I assume._

"Ugh..." Yvonne groaned in a passive tone. "Ooh..." she moaned now erotically. It was apparently some habit of hers that if a low, groaning sound came from her mouth a slightly more arousing one would have to follow. "What happened?"

_Lie still_ Beelzebub shouted mentally. Yvonne was shocked into paralysis and stayed as still as she could. _My claws are several inches deep in your skull. If you move improperly you will die._

"What are you doing?" Yvonne growled. She ignored Beelzebub's instructions just enough to kick him in what was apparently his abdomen. "Get out of my brain!"

_I am almost finished_ Beelzebub said. _Her attack on you damaged you mind. I must repair it before you consciously use it again._

"Fuck that!" Yvonne snarled. "I need to kill that bitch before she gets too far!"

_It is too late for that_ Beelzebub informed. _I can no longer sense her vitals. She is dead, I'm afraid._ Yvonne started getting extremely mad. Beelzebub could tell by the rushing of fluid to her brain, all those hormonal fluids and synapse explosions, that she was about to have some kind of hysterical reaction of rage.

"So I already killed her?" Yvonne asked calmly.

_I can't say for certain_ Beelzebub began _if it were you or some crazed homeless man who ended her life, but she wasn't able to get too far before dying._ Suddenly the rush of energy to her brain ceased and calming endorphins were released as a response.

"At least she's dead" Yvonne said. "I went to some stupid lengths to kill her, but a dumb bitch like her couldn't have gone far with her cherry popped." Beelzebub had no retort for her logic. As long as she was calm and the memories were again sealed far into her brain, she would be fine to continue. He released his claws form her head and ethereal steam rose up from the small, blue marks of blood he made. Then oxygen met the droplets and they turned red, but no other signs of injury were visible.

_Congratulations_ Beelzebub said. He helped Yvonne up with his skeletal, alien hand and then set himself on her head as his disguised form. _What now?_

"I'm going home" Yvonne began as she pushed her hair back "to wash this stink of disgusting restroom fuck off my body." And so Yvonne left the park at night and set out for her house in the city. The shocking memories of her youth and the debilitating truth of her own body's soiled state was safely locked away thanks to her guardian extra-terrestrial. So now the count of failure is set at two. Will Samuel and Mort meet with a similar fate of loss?


	52. The Eyes above God

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Sam's eyes were closed tight, his pale-white lids exposing a sleepless blue shade of exposed veins around the bags of his narrow observers. His lashes were even sharp and short and covered the edges of his eyes very carefully.

"Oh, come now" Gott chided, reaching out and grabbing Sam's forehead. "You have lovely...**eyes**." He had to take a pause to breath in so he could growl out that word. His greedy, blood-stained fingers reached for Sam's tightly shut lids and began pulling up at them. He pushed them against Sam's squishy eyeballs and tried to forced them up and he tried raised them by pulled at Sam's groomed eyebrows. Nothing worked. "Are you that concerned for my health? I'm flattered."

"You can eat shit" Sam insulted "and go kill yourself. My eyes aren't meant to be open..."

"Then you've come here" Gott began "using all of your other sense?" Sam grunted and raised his head up a bit. "If you never open your eyes, how can you tell what the world in all its absurdity and strangeness looks like?"

"I wasn't being literal" Sam growled. "My eyes are cursed. I can't open them, and I can never allow them to be seen!"

"Cursed?" Gott repeated. His crooked smile grew and touched near his temples, all pearly white jagged zigzags of disgusting enamel. His eyes bulged out beyond the scope of tangible reality and nearly came out of his head. A thin layer of viscus mucus prevented them from hovering out and dangling down. "Why, silly boy, only science prevails in this world. People who believe in curses or demons or ghosts are just foolish! They only want to push the blame of their misfortune and idiotic problems on an arcane source that can store it all. That way they can remain innocent and blameless forever. You are just a coward, afraid of facing your own demented problems!"

"The world is absurd" Sam began, "and that's why ghosts and demons aren't so far-fetched. Who's to say that some of the major problems in life aren't because of some kind of mythological intervention? Maybe my arrival here is proof that mystic hands are helping me along through my life and teaching me my lessons."

"Doubtful" Gott said mockingly. "I'm sure if I dissect this little mystery I can find a scientific solution!"

_Nice choice of words_ Sam thought sarcastically, mostly in response to the word 'dissect'. _Dammit. These freaks are all pretty strong. I can't move anything but my eyes...and God knows if they get their fingers on my eyelids they'll be able to pry them off pretty damn easily._ Just as he thought that one of the happy, cheerful clones moved its fingers to his face and covered his eyes with loose fingers. _SHIT! Fucking cliché SHIT!!! When will it end!?_

"Peek-a-boo!" the girly maniac cheered. She opened his eyes between her index and middle fingers. Now here is where things, as an author, get difficult. How am I to describe something that I myself do not fully comprehend. In his eyes there was nothing but blackness, darkness that made even the gaping black of space seem bright and sparkling. It was a terrible, fantastic black that can only exist in places where the human mind dares not probe and pry. His eyes were not human, they were blacker than any ink and pierced through the air with a graceful lethality sharper and faster than any sword or bullet. His eyes were those of not a demon, not a God, but **something greater...**

"OOOOHHH!!!" Gott squealed, his expression becoming almost comically distorted with joy. He even clasped his hands together and drew them up to his cheekbone. The clones holding Sam's arms made the infinitely foolish act of looking into Sam's eyes. After doing so, their own eyes faded to a dust gray and dissolved as dry dust.

"OW!" a male shouted, clutching his new empty eye sockets that started oozing his synthetic blood. "OOOOWWW!!!"

"I'm blind!" a female shouted. Those that saw Sam's eyes, aside form the demonically immortal Gott, were reduced to nothingness. His own eyes were transfixed gravely on Gott, as the darkness gave way to the shining white dots that were his inverted pupils.

"MAKE IT STOP!" another injured clone demanded.

"You see?" Sam said. "This is something best left to other places, outside this world."

"Wherever did those come from?" Gott asked. "I feel like...like a hot iron is being thrust into the darkest, unused depths of my mind! What amazing power do you possess, Mr. Killer?"

"All I behold" Sam began "is humbled before me. I hold the gaze of ultimate destruction, of obliteration. Nothing survives if it sees my true self...it is a curse."

"Sounds to me like a wonderful boon" Gott said, his teeth starting to crack under the pressure of his gritting smile. "Such a fierce, amazing sight. How do you see the world through such pigmented eyes?"

"I don't" Sam flatly said. He finally found his chance and diverted his stare into Gott's teeth. Like a pearly mirror, the concentrated blast of imperceptive power blasted off his teeth and into the eyes of several clones holding him down. The one behind him, holding his eyes open, was the recipient of such a gaze and as such her head simply fell off. No blood spurt from her neck, as a disgusting fleshy mold grew over the open would in an instant. Sam's right arm was now free, and he used it to elbow away the remaining creatures. They all fell with smiles, but those who met his eyes were writhing in uncontrollable pain and using emotions hat had never been programmed into their blank minds.

"Tricky little human" Gott sneered. His smile was finally frozen in place and his teeth shattered. A moment alter a myriad of terrible spikes grew from his gums and clacked together loudly. Now he resembled the monster he really was. Sam grabbed his glasses from his coat pocket and began running away down the cell block. He looked back once, noticing how little movement there was in the horde. Then he looked forward and continued running. All at once the army moved, as a unified group of soulless soldiers, and started simultaneously running down the stretch at him. More came from below, and more came from too far away for Sam to realize.

_I've been through shit before_ Sam told himself as he picked up his pace and rounded the corner. _I've survived worse odds. I've beaten out the universe at least once in my life...that's all it really takes..._

And now Sam's mind wandered back to the day where he cheated death and then laughed in its face...

* * *

The rain came down hard. Even through the canopy that blocked out the sun during the day, the droplets that formed made enormous splashes. Thunder flashed occasionally, offering but thin columns of white light in brief flashes. A squad of men, tired and war-weary, sat under the shade of the trees that all sat in the shade of the rain. Three men were on the dirt ground with their arms down in the jungle thick beside them, one stood guard with his gun held tight. One man with oval glasses, prescription, shining in the dark like flashlights. Samuel Coroza was his registered name, but for the sake of significant army-related troubles he only went by the name 'Eyes', as his were the best of his squad.

"It's quiet" one shouted over the loud, heavy rain.

"It's almost creepy" another called from a few meters away.

"You alright Eyes?" the third shouted to Sam. Sam just nodded and checked his gun. "Maybe you should sleep."

"No sleeping" Sam said sternly. "My dreams never end well. I don't like to sleep if I don't need to. Besides, I'm wide awake right now." The sky suddenly split open with a huge crack of thunder. None of the men flinched.

"That sound is getting annoying" one of the thick-jawed soldiers muttered. "I'd rather hear gunfire right now."

"That's just what they want" the other with mud on his face replied. "They want us vulnerable psychologically, like in the mind."

"Chill out" the third said calmly. "Just stay chill, alright? It's just a rainy night. Our shelter is set up whenever we want to sleep even those bastards aren't crazy or stupid enough to come out here into the jungle to kill us in our sleep."

"I think they are" Sam said. "If there are panthers and monkeys and other blood-crazed creatures out here, who's to say they haven't trained their own brand of inhuman monsters to fight in extraneous circumstances..."

"Because that sounds fucked up" thick-jaw said.

"We should be on guard for panthers" mud-face said "if they're really out here. They won't hesitate just because we have weapons. They aren't afraid of guns."

"Lucky creatures" Sam said. "Fear is what killed squad Bravo, and tenacity is what killed squad Bug-Eye."

"Good men" thick-jaw said.

"Amen" the third agreed.

"They died manly deaths" mud-face agreed. "Just like we will soon..."

"How nihilist" the third noted.

"Don't joke about shit like that" thick-jaw demanded harshly. "This is a warzone, and I intend to return from it!"

"Oh, always the worrier, you" mud-face said. "This is a war, and therefore we _will_ die in it. There aren't any heroes out here. We're all just villains fighting under different banners."

"You're one of the prisoner corps" the third asked, "aren't you?"

"Yeah" mud-face answered. "That doesn't make you any better than me and it doesn't make me any less than you."

"I agree" Sam said, trying to break the building argument. A huge crack of lightning, hitting dangerously nearby, finished the job for him. "We are all equal here in the war. As men we fight, and as corpses we burn."

"Now if that ain't nihilism" thick-jaw said "I don't know what is." The rest of existence kept on going while these men whittled away short moments of their life in idle chatting. The genocide occurring just outside the jungle thick, one that would be marked as the last great atrocity of the modern era, had taken an abrupt halt as the last true bastion of the soon-to-be obliterated people was holding out very well. All things continued on as they normally should. Then the universe took an abrupt and unorthodox shock to its system.

The cosmic freeway experienced a grizzly eighty-car pile-up and all that despair, all that death, all that was released with the brutal resonance of energy, landed into the thin clearing where these four soldiers sat and rested. Thick-jaw, Mud-face and What's-his-name were blown away by abnormally powerful lightning, while the brilliant cosmic flash scarred the eyes of the sole survivor Sam. He too was thrown through the air, but his body landed.

Theirs did not.

"What the fuck!?" Sam shouted into the darkness. His eyes felt strange, in that there was no feeling in his eyes anymore. The fall he took must have jarred his nervous system, and mo matter how much he moved his eyes around he could neither feel them moving nor see where he wanted to look. His vision was set on some unknown cluster of stars within a dusty backdrop of evil purple and benevolent red. The black between the stars seemed to form the shape of some slender man moving through the infinity, frozen in mid-step forever with hands in his pockets and hair messed and laying in all directions upon his head.

"What is this!?" Sam demanded. "What's going on here...what happened to me! GAH! BY BODY! IT BURNS!!!"

_This is fate_.

Suddenly a blast of consciousness invaded Sam's brain. His eyes were forever set into that horrible state, and he saw the world form so far away that it existed to him as a lonely speck against the black murkiness of everything. He saw himself moving as the slightest and tiniest of things, he saw the galaxies spinning and imploding all around him, he saw the center of all universal gravity collapsing the weight of existence upon itself...he saw everything, but when he looked into his own eyes from so far away...**he saw nothing at all.**

_Can you see now?_

"No..." Sam answered.

_Can you see it now!?_

"NO!" Sam answered in pain. "I can't see anything!!!"

_Then your fate is decided...you are dead......__And here I am_ Sam thought in the present, running into the deadest of all ends. _Dead again..._ He looked behind him at the empty stretch of walkway just as the first of the clones came with its head whipping to find him. It spotted him and grinned wide.

* * *

"Over here gang!" it called in an oddly 70s voice. The army came roaring around the corner, pushing bodies over the railing and down to the far-below floor like a living wave throwing foam all over the place. "Let's get him!"

"He's so dreamy!" a girl shouted.

"I'll rupture his colon!" another girl exclaimed quite cheerfully.

"Strange subject matter" Sam muttered. He gripped his fingers in anticipation and jumped to the right at the last moment, just before the first body slammed through the wall and into the open street. The clones who made it outside were faced with the thrones of hellish animals who had just finished devouring the last of the mercenaries who could not hide themselves well enough. The swarms of carnivorous birds still clouded the sky and covered the roofs. Sam grabbed onto the lowest bar of the railing and managed to flip himself directly into the lower leveled walkway, suffering only a mild blunt impact from the concrete wall he hit.

"Apparently" Sam observed, adjusting his glasses, "most of these walls are just part of the fake backdrop for the town. Somehow...that doesn't add up..."

"How observant" Gott said, hovering in on his little device. He stepped off his flying platform, letting it drop down automatically to the ground far below. Gott took two steps forward with his evil face and narrowly slit yellow demon eyes until he was just adequately far enough from Sam to stand against whatever threat he pulled from his jacket.

"Being awfully cautious" Sam began "for an immortal being, aren't you?"

"I can't be to careful with you" Gott said, "my future prize subject."

"Just what can you learn" Sam began "about human nature through me? I'm as inhuman as a corporate executive can get. I can ruin a man's life in less than three seconds without changing my expression from total apathy. I can destroy an entire franchise that employs thousands and not bat an eyelash."

"All thanks to you powers" Gott said. Sam wanted to retort, but he didn't have the means to do so. Instead he just nervously shifted his face towards the bars of an empty cell. "I have taken such a grave interest in you, Mr. Killer. Please, join me in my own plans. Together, I truly believe we can change this world for the better of human evolution!" Sam looked down and thought about the proposal for a moment. Then he saw it: a golden lapel pin. Dropped from one of the rushing clones, no doubt. With his eyes hidden behind his glasses he looked all about and formulated his plan of attack.

"Sure" Sam said, slowly removing his sacred glasses with two delicate fingers. "Why not? In this game of live or die, we only have so many options anyway. We can either adapt and live...or we can give up...**and die.**" At his growl he sprang forward, throwing his glasses at Gott as a distraction. Gott opened his disgusting maw and ate the glasses, then clutched Sam's head in his clawed hand before he could grab for his weapon.

"What a pity" Gott said. His muscular furrow turned up and moved the skin from his mouth up to expose his bloody-rotten gums."Here I was planning on working with you and prolonging your own little game."

"You knew about it!?" Sam exclaimed.

"Of course" Gott said. "I'm not an ignorant bounty. How may of those do you think exist? However, I do indeed agree with your position. In life you can either adapt and survive...or you can die." Gott drew out Sam's gun, the one of mythical caliber, and drew back the hammer. A clone came down in the same fashion that Sam had just moments later and his amazing black eyes shot open with distress.

_Shit_ Sam cursed. Gott smiled and furrowed his brow back into a demonic anger as he held the long barrel of the gun to his temple. _Shit, no! That won't count! IT WON'T COUNT!_

"STOP!!!" Sam demanded. Too late. One explosive blast and thunderous rush of air later, Gott was without a head. His body flew on after the mist that was once his brains while Sam's holy weapon dropped to the ground with him. The clone behind him, which he saw from a cosmic distance, was twitching in some strange epileptic manner. Foam started building at its mouth and its skeleton started shaking violently with its spasms. With Gott gone the clones would also fall, all part of his plan prematurely executed...

"Shit" Sam cursed. His eyes bored small holes of vaporized dust into the concrete floor beneath him. He picked up his gun and checked the ammo. Empty, of course. Now he could not punish himself for his disgraceful failure. "Shit...I...I failed..." Failure lives strong. It goes form person to person and brings hardship and curses to one's life. Even when one does everything right and is an inch away from their ultimate goal, the cruel universe can still stop them dead in their tracks.

And now these three killers have failed. Their progress down the road of kingdom has been impeded and their records tarnished. But what of the last one standing, that madman Mort? Can he still succeed?


	53. The Escape from Reality

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

After one swift manipulation of reality, Mort was up the walls, standing on the ceiling, and entered the door he fought to find for so long. Once he stepped over its threshold all ties to the former reality he knew disappeared, and he found himself walking in a hallway crafted by strange dimensions. The windows were Gothic arches of stone and stained glass, each two-stories tall and reflected on a strange plane to sum up to huge four-story windows. The stones were the darkest pitch of black but each stood out from the other through a thick blurred outline of gray.

"What an odd chapel I'm in" Mort mused to himself. "I suppose one must discontinue his proper existence in order to safely travel here. My target has hid himself well. He didn't assume I could change my views and understanding of reality as quickly as he himself could.

"Incorrect, young infidel" Gore said, his soulless sneering voice echoing through all the chambers and landing bluntly in Mort's head. "I anticipated your arrival above all things. I knew some harbinger of doom, some living advent of penance would come for me at length, and thus I have prepared. Trevor was but one of my sheep who mastered my delicate arts of reality-substitution. The others are all dead from the previous attempts at my life."

"There were others?" Mort asked, mainly to himself.

"Many others" Gore answered. "Look below you." Mort instinctively looked up, remembering that he entered the while walking upside-down and was therefore technically on the roof. There was a distant floor identical to his with black light shining fiercely from the rippled glass of the stained windows.

"What am I looking at?" Mort asked.

"Oh" Gore's voice said. "Oh! You...you got it already! Most of them looked at the ceiling at their feet when I said- Never mind. These are the shadows of all those who have fallen in pursuit of me, and soon yours will join them..." From the floor far below an army of black figures, all of them rotted down to skeletons of shaking black from the countless ages, came into the perverse existence. "Also, you can't walk on the ceiling right now. I just cleaned it." Mort suddenly felt all his weight shift close to his head and realized what had happened.

_I'm in his reality now_ Mort told himself. He slammed down hard to the floor where the staggering mindless creatures congregated and held his shovel in front of him, ready to fight. _My legs aren't broken. I barely feel any kind of general fear or disturbance from these strange affairs. Apparently he is still in control of this existance, but I can still directly control my own existence. I am my own world, passing through this one so as to kill its heart, Reverend Gore..._

"Fair enough" Mort said, lowering his goggles and twirling the spade around his biceps. He stopped it in the flexed grip between his right forearm and bicep, holding the back end with his gloved hand. "How much **Raple-syrup** would you like with your order of **FUCKING DIE!!!!**" Mort started roaring and ran forward. The skeletons shook violently, like cheap horror ghosts would, and made equally swift dashes. They all split apart from Mort's running line and stayed just outside his reach. Mort didn't exactly care if they weren't fighting him anymore. He could see the door leagues away. However, even with a cleared beeline for the exit of this strange place in sight, Mort felt the need to turn around and arm himself against the now attacking shadows.

One stabbed with its clawed hand, the shadowy aura extending out to form longer claws of immaterial force. Mort blocked the attack with his shovel, forced the attackers hand down and bashed the skull with the metal of his spade. Now with cracks of damage, Mort advanced his attack and stabbed between its slightly gaping teeth to pierce its jaw. Then he tripped it while spinning around and gave it a stern backhand with a flexed arm. That skull was shattered to pieces, but the body continued to move. Mort shoved his shovel into its shadow-covered sternum and pressed down with his foot on the blunt edges of the spade, piercing into the stone underneath the invisibly black carpet and dug up a scoop of dirt and broken, twisted bone.

That skeleton dissolved into the nothingness that made it, but a small army still stood in his way. Mort sighed and began attacking. He threw wide and powerful full-swings with his shovel, always hitting skull, while dodging the pounces and claws of the others that attacked. They were mad, though not mindless, as their tactics seemed to center around having only four fighting at once. This led Mort to make a vaguely-informed assumption while slashing a skull apart.

_Gore must be controlling them_ Mort said _from wherever he is. That's why only so many can move at a time, he can't handle the extreme pressure of moving so many of these things at once._ Mort stabbed the upper vertebrae of one skeleton and balanced the skull on his shovel as the body shifted from side to side. Mort threw the skull at one of the skeletons in the back. It simply stepped to the side and glared out its eye-holes while the headless body Mort just made stopped moving and fell to the floor, dissolving a moment later.

_However, the less he has to command, the more complex the commands can be. That presents somewhat of a problem for me to keep killing them, but something tells me he has blessed them all with some hideous one-hit kill power to fight me with._ Mort made a powerful slash after that thought, one that started at the hips which were fully rotated and ended with his torso swinging the same way as his shovel and fully extended arm. _Perhaps I've been playing too many video games with Thomas lately...'One-hit kill' is an unsophisticated term to use..._Mort continued fighting, whittling away the numbers of the skeletal army with each skull he shattered and each bone-structure he de-structured. He was fighting out of necessity, not rage, and stayed perfectly focused on all his sides. When one skeleton stopped fighting him he prepared for another one to attack from the back of the line. They were becoming more powerful as he chopped them down one by one, the darkness around them growing into a sort of pseudo-muscular structure. Mort knew that when only one was left all the power would be transferred into it and prove to be a much more difficult prey than all of them combined. At least as a legion most of them stayed mindlessly away from the fighting.

* * *

"Is this the best you can do?" Mort asked as he chopped away another lifeless thing. The more he killed, the thicker the shadows became. Eventually he re-strategized and started fighting as he retreated down the hall for the distant door. Somehow the space between he and his objective had closed considerably as he was fighting, but before he could logically view his surroundings to solve the puzzle he felt a rush of wind at his back. He stopped, spun around on his heel, and delivered a madly powerful baseball swing to a skeleton's face, sending said face and body through one of the widows and out into an infinite void of nameless stars. Mort looked out as the huge glass started to shatter, freeze in the air, and then zoom away into the infinite blackness like stars in hyper-space.

_I suppose this is proof_ Mort thought _that I'm not in Kansas anymore_. The light from his body was drained, leaving him in a super-high contrast shade of black with the outline of his figure in glaring white. The floor was white, the air was black, nothing seemed to make sense anymore. As the demonic skeletons came rushing through the hallway and into the anti-light they too changed form, becoming glowing white beasts with eyes of glowing blackness. Mort fought off the beasts in the bizarre warp of light and tried hard to exit it. He felt the wind of his fate, the wind he followed so intently and zealously, rushing out the window with incredible speed, although he felt no actual pressure from the apparent vacuum of reality that existed outside the existential-cathedral walls.

_I can't tell_ Mort thought as he batted his lumbering foes away _if I am to go out into that void, or if I am to find that door. This reality could very well be warping my own predestiny to lead me into a swifter death. If only I had a moment of peace to meditate on this perplexing matter, all would be well and resolved, but these fuckers won't stop trying to hit me!_ Mort found himself overwhelmed and rolled away, slashing with his shovel as he went, catching the jawbone of one demon and ripping it off. He then got up in the regular irregular light and held his weapon with the spade pointed forward and his off-hand casually gripping the length of the wooden handle like a billiard stick.

"HYAH!" Mort shouted. He started stabbing rapidly. The beasts that moved out of the light at him had a rotten-black muscular exterior now over their skeletal form and several even had normally reformed eyes. They were breathing in huffs of breath that Mort couldn't understand, finding even their slightest sounds incomprehensible in his mind, but stabbed at them nonetheless. He was able to shove his weapon into the face of one, which he then powered down onto the floor so his metal hit the stone through the demon's face. With the blacks of his goggles reflecting the white of nothing, he shoved down with his foot and separated brain from skull in one swift, malicious motion. The other skeletons stepped away warily, all of them having at least the conscious to move in evasion on their own. Mort held the remains of one ethereal brain up long enough to view the lightning-like static of its final synaptic moments detached from its body. It was marvelous, watching a brain work postmortem, but also incidental.

"I think I get it now" Mort said. He removed his shovel from beneath the brain and kicked it up into the air, hackey-sacking the moist half-pound of gray matter from foot to foot and hitting it once with a powerful shoulder shrug. "These things I am fighting were not men who were too weak to fight, but men who were too smart to realize the obvious answer."

"Is that so?" Gore's voice asked mockingly from all directions at once. "Are you stupid enough to understand, then?"

"Yes" Mort said obviously. He stopped kicking the brain with one final kick to throw it in the air. As it spun, all dented and mushy in the space above him, the other monsters gazed up at it with some strange longing. Mort glared hard through his goggles and took his shovel in hand like a sword with barely any cutting edge. He lurched forward and made a tremendous swing, decapitating five demons at once, then he took a mighty step back and stabbed into another one's gut. He wrenched his shovel in and twisted it like a terrible drill, the whole way around. Black amorphous lumps started spilling out, obviously the still semi-planar organs and other internal squishies of the thing, from the hole Mort made it its abdomen. Mort then took a step back, lining his feet up, and brought his shovel around behind him. Just as the brain started to fall he aimed at it and spiked it with an overhead swing into the face of one unprepared thing. It's face impacted and then its own brain-meat started oozing out.

"These things" Mort began "are neither human nor inhuman. They are beyond the realm of humanity, operating as one and many at the same time. They are superior beings, like army ants with telepathy. Although, who is to say army ants or worker bees don't already possess some strange connection through mental or aural energy? They can only coordinate themselves so much, and so when one thinks the others must act accordingly at the drop of a proverbial hat. Seeing the brain of one of their fellow things like that, totally unexposed and still working to give orders, it must have overloaded their receptive organs. No skull and skin to dampen the command, they were obviously overwhelmed, like an outlet receiving too much power. Am I at least close to being right?"

"You're close" Gore began "to being dead!" There were still monsters left, these ones adapting very pale or pink skin with nails and teeth and blinking eye lids. Mort blocked one blow and was thrown into the anti-light again. He dreaded fighting such strange demons with such disadvantageous odds, but he had a plan. That plan manifested itself from the grin of brown lips that shined out in the light of black and white. Mort lifted himself off the ground, crossed his arms, and flew out into the eternal blackness just out the windows. The monsters watched him fly and saluted him as he left, the window repairing itself in preparation for its next unfortunate visitor.

* * *

Mort now found himself flying at an incredible pace through what seemed to be the universe itself. Galaxies of spiraling green and blue, explosive red and orange, spaces of space that were blacker than black; all the cosmos spread out before Mort. But instead of flying, why not walk? Mort steadied himself out and began walking at a casual pace through existence, **strolling about the cosmos with a total lack of impatience or worry.** He raised his goggles up to his forehead and lowered his hood. Wherever he was, he felt like it was safe. And not just safe but incredibly exhilarating.

"Just being here" Mort began with a sigh "makes me feel so nostalgic."

"How so?" Asked Gore in honest curiosity. Mort had won Gore's greatest obstacle and earned the right to relax, it seemed. Now was his break from the action to just talk and breath calmly.

"This emptiness" Mort began, "it reminds me of my first kill. The hollow guilt inside me that filled as quickly as the hole that I had dug for my victim. Every kill after that was just a hole that needed to be filled, until that sensation was numb within me, and I never felt it again after the third one...I think."

"I understand what you mean" Gore said. Existence shifted. Mort found himself standing at the edge of a brilliant, shining white galaxy that was only a few meters across to him. "That feeling is...unforgettable. Some men cannot handle such an icy emptiness and they go mad with grief and loathing. They turn to hatred and insanity to fill that hole with other hollow and meaningless emotions. Other men try to fill that void with blood and continue to kill, unaware that the blood they use only succeeds in deepening that horrific hole and widening the depth of their despair."

"But I" Mort began "am no man like that. I took that hollowness and turned it into an unfulfilled objective. Where there was a gap in my soul, I would fill it with something material. What I found first was dirt, and since then it has been the only thing to hold my heart steadfast in the face of mighty winds."

"So you continued to kill" Gore said "but instead of blood you filled those guilt holes with dirt. Does that not make you a soiled, unclean human? Would that not make you filthy, a being more mud than man?"

"Is that a racist remark?" Mort asked.

"Certainly not" Gore said. "A human can be ugly, regardless of his skin, from the inside."

"I suppose it may" Mort admitted "but I've become consciously aware of that enough to attempt to correct it with my dignified behavior."

"All things considered" Gore said. Mort considered his interpretation, but as his eyes drifted from the core of the shining galaxy he found that reality had once again displaced him in this model universe. Now he saw a beautiful swirl of reds and blues and oranges and greens as the spun and spiraled around a center that Mort could not see. His eyes drifted away from the spectrum of beauty and towards a total nothingness. Black. **Bold Black. **_**EXTREME BLACK!!!!**_

"A black hole?" Mort asked. He gripped his shovel hard, then lost it to the cruel reality of the Event Horizon he stood so near. He felt himself falling down, then landed as a feather on a trail of cosmic dust as it was drained into eternal darkness. Mort could see the transparent outlines of many other figures like him, human shaped, as they waited for their sidewalk to end into an endless force of destruction. "What...is this...?"

"The End" Gore said. "Where else to things go when the wall of the universe is shown before them? Can you drive on through a black hole? Honestly? Not even light can escape it. Don't think idealism is faster or lighter than even pure light."

"So this is how you kill me?" Mort asked. "A symbolic gesture that ends in super-dense compaction in a lightless mass? Couldn't you just kill me like a normal man?"

"You say you understand" Gore said "but honestly, you're as lost as the rest of them were." Mort scoffed and smiled. He shook his head and sat down in the darkening blue.

"This _is _a dream then" Mort said in amusement. "That's somewhat disappointing."

"If I possessed the ability" Gore began "to selectively control my reality I would have white-washed this entire planet of pointless idealism by now! This is all just a distraction to suit my own needs."

"In other words" Mort began "I'm perfectly safe, or maybe I'm not. You just wanted to move my body without me knowing that I was moved. However, I know this isn't some extremely elaborate and super-effective drug. This isn't a brainwashing side-effect. This can't be a complex and perverse hypnotism. What exactly is this?" Suddenly the universe ended. As Mort reached the edge of the Event Horizon, the truest point of no return, the light all came rushing back from the formerly dark colors around him. Colors beyond his wildest imagining were made glaringly clear to him as he was rocketed into the center of another entirely new existence.

He zoomed with impossible speed through the blackness of the cosmos, came to a strangely familiar galaxy of wispy starry gas and dust, entered the outer reaches of one of its arms, came past a string of planets and finally came to one planet with a single pale satellite. His vision was thrown onto that green and blue world where he went into the darkness of the night, fell with the rain onto the roof of an ancient building, and then reached through the walls and entered the body of some man he knew.

* * *

Mort's eyes shot open with furrowed brow. The head he entered was his own, from all the way outside of his own universe, he now found himself sitting on a regally crafted chair with many nasty nail scratches and saw marks. He raised his arms and tested his feeling by gripping with each finger. Then he stood up, found the ground oddly hard, and grabbed his shovel that was sheathed on his back. He grabbed it with one hand and walked forward, his eyes adjusting to the dirty, plain colors of the real reality and taking in the brutal surroundings of the new room.

Upon the walls there was an armory of chainsaws and serrated blades of varying type and build. Some mechanical and some purely artistic in craft. The room seemed longer that wide, the ceiling eleven-feet up with lights built into its rafters and clouds of stagnant dust floating about. The wood was old and well-aged, carrying a tint of red in its natural brown. Tables were strewn out along two opposite walls and were covered with sharp knives and irons for heating and scissors for cutting through thin sheets of metal; tools for building weapons, obviously. Mort smiled internally when he saw on the wall of armaments a shovel, one with a longer spade and a sharper point, most likely one used for digging deep but narrow holes for gardening. Then the last figure of the room came into view: a man in a white coat with a pointed hood and an Omega symbol emblazoned in gold on the back.

"I am glad" Gore, the man in the robe, began "that I can exit life with such a wonderful climax!"

"I'll make sure" Mort replied "that you're neck whistles out one last whimper once I **lop off your head.**"

"Haughty words" Gore said, his hood darkly covering his face. He drew out a long metal pole, onto which at the top was affixed a **rotary saw**, attached with a gas-powered motor with tubes and wires feeding into tiny holes drilled near the tip of the pole. Gore reached down on his malicious polearm and found a ripcord to start the motor with down at the opposite end of the shaft. He yanked it hard, starting up the horrible whining of a spinning sawblade, and aimed the terrible thing at Mort. Mort raised his hood, lowered his goggles and aimed his shovel in a nearly mirrored gesture.

Finally, the two remaining forces will clash in an epic struggle!!!


	54. The Victory, at Last

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Metal met rotating metal and dastardly sparks of golden and red flew out onto the floor. Gore's rotating saw-spear pressed down against the edge of Mort's decrepit, aged shovel. The trusty metal of the spade held out fast while meeting the 4,000 RPM force of the uninhibited table saw.

"How is it?" Gore growled. "This is the same weapon I used to end the lives of hundreds of non-believers! I have a record average of 8.12 kills per second in any given rampage!"

"What kind of priest" Mort shouted "measures something like that? Shouldn't you concentrate on detaching yourself from worldly goods? You are a twisted existential pastor, after all."

"Twisted?" Gore said. Mort pushed away and came in. He knew if he could get inside his weapon, past his effective cutting range, it would be too much hassle for him to draw the killing edge back and Mort could go to town. Gore backed up, staying aware of his environment, then stepped away to the side just as he neared the wall. Mort spun to keep him in front and had to block the sawblade once again, bracing it with all his weight. "The views of such a prophetic process are subjective. It's nothing someone like you could fully comprehend!"

"Oh really?" Mort said. He pushed the blade away. Gore backed up and brought the edge in on the other side of Mort's body. Mort swatted it away and rushed inside his range. Gore grabbed onto a handle for steadying his grip and pulled down on it. Mort didn't have to understand mechanics or engineering to know what happened, he just had to understand his enemy's intentions. He ducked and rolled as the blade came zipping down the shaft where his head was, making a high-pitched whine as it went. Gore aimed the empty shaft down at Mort and released the handle. It and the blade snapped back to their original place. Mort rolled away and found his back to a wall with two other walls at his sides. That's when he noticed the gravest error of all.

"Men like you" Gore began, lowering and slowing down his weapon, "are all the same. You're lazy, uncooperative, deceitful-"

"Are you talking about me" Mort began "as an individualist or me as a black man? I just need to gauge how insulted I should seem when you talk to me hereafter."

"Racism" Gore began "is the single most foolish invention of the lunatics of God's creation. Why hate a man for being different? You'll end up hating all men! If you hate men because of their skin, you'll lose the focus of an individual perspective and not be able to tell who is truly worthy of subjective and objective loathing! The worth of a single man will be judged by the bigots and other assorted shit-head candy-dandies solely by his race! It's a travesty of justice; no, it's a travesty of modern thought!!!"

"So" Mort said "you're insulting my views? I can live with that."

"Let's you and I face it" Gore continued. "The 'isms' of today have gotten out of control! It's unlikely that you won't find a person who holds some anti-group loathing anymore. There's always something stupid that the populous loves to abhor and they do it en mass most of the time. But enough about that. I'd prefer such a broad subject goes untouched between us for now." Mort nodded in agreement. "Unlike your neck, which I intend to sever." Gore revved his saw up with a deafening whine and lurched slowly forward.

_Shit_ Mort cursed. _This room was built specifically for him to fight in. He can control his effective attacking range, close or far, and his weapon is just long enough to reach from his body to the wall on either side of him! I'm trapped...however, it seems that he enjoys fighting more than pushing his prey into hopeless corners._ Mort ditched his shovel. I apologize for that digging pun. With his primary weapon, the tool by which he murdered so many people in the past and would have done so with in the future, was on the ground. Mort jumped up to the knee-high table behind him and grabbed a modified chainsaw with with two blades and four exhaust pipes.

"What are you doing!?" Gore asked over the chugging growl of Mort's new weapon as he revved it up. He held both the choke cords in his grip and ripped them until the engine began humming and roaring its evil roar. The blades moved with the godspeed destruction that drove Mort out of his mind before, but this time less human thoughts came into his mind as he wielded the marvelously evil weapon.

_This thing_ Mort thought _would never be a part of anyone's military. In a battlefield situation, detection equals death. Running around with a chainsaw would be like running around with a live flare tapped to your head. Why anyone would choose to use these tools in combat is beyond me, because they are prone to breaking, backfiring and a myriad of other negative circumstances to its user._

"Why" Mort said aloud, over the impossibly loud roars, "are we fighting like this!? It would go much faster if we tried to strangle each other to death wearing neck braces!"

"Why shouldn't we fight with these!?" Gore demanded. "They are tools for ripping through even the toughest natural materials! This saw of mine can cleave a man's skull with a single stroke!"

"So can a sword!" Mort said. "Even so, simply caving in the skull would kill a man. Overkill like this is barely passable as cinematic, and even I would like to think an audience that's well-researched in action films would want to see a fight with a bit more substance to it."

"**YOU TALK TOO MUCH!!!**" Gore shouted. He spun his staff overhead and prepared to strike down. Mort rushed in and swung his devilish weapon, hitting the already spinning blade of Gore's weapon head on.

* * *

Mort and Gore started out on opposite sides of the room now and rushed each other. Mort dove in under Gore's stabbing motion and tried to make a simple, shallow cut without forcing himself into a follow-through run. He failed, and his simple cut made him spin with the inertial force the heavy machine he wielded produced. Gore was too close to hack at Mort with his polearm, so he began backing away. Mort finally repositioned himself and began to rush in, but Gore stabbed at him with the blade horizontal. Mort considered blocking it, but considering how easily Gore could manipulate the device to fit through the space between his chainsaw blades, he opted instead to dodge it and then hit the metal pole so it would get thrown to the side.

The shaft of Gore's polearm carried the weight of Mort's slight tap and the whining circular blade skipped off the floor and through the wooden wall. Mort rushed in screaming, though his scream was covered by the roar of two loud gas-powered murder tools. Mort mad ea thrust upward, carrying the weight of the tool so the blades faced straight up. Then, with a stomp, he brought it screaming down. Gore gripped his shaft tightly and brought it in front of his face for protection. The flashing sparks shone on Gore's mask, a simple white one with only one dark hole for breathing and a red swatstika. No visible eye holes or nostril slots, just the mark of Hindu fortune. Mort pushed and broke Gore away, gaining ground. Gore ran back but couldn't retreat faster than Mort could pursue and got caught in another power struggle.

Mort followed through with his attack, released the weight of his body into his weapon, and spun on his heel to make another slash using the power of the previous one. Gore barely escaped with his midsection attached. His robe was torn into ugly tatters and his undergarments were revealed. He wore plain farm-hand style clothing stereotypical of southern hillbillies. Denim overalls and a dirt-stained white shirt. Although, knowing the history of Gore as a bounty of Hell, the dirt most likely dried blood. Mort said something under the roar of his blades, which Gore heard and responded properly to. They broke away and lowed the growling hum of their weapons.

"I'm getting concerned" Mort admitted "about the constant spiral of this mad little dance we're doing."

"How so?" Gore asked.

"These things" Mort said, looking at his shaking weapon "are deliverers of devastation, but they are also prone to inducing bouts of madness in their wielders. Like cursed swords, or something cliché, they are instruments that deliver sane men into a realm of total darkness, total madness..."

"I am aware of that" Gore admitted. "In fact, if you haven't yet noticed, this entire chapel and the religion I have founded is based solely around such madness. You see, that feeling of blood clogging and flooding the brain delivers men into fits of uncontrollable rage! If men can learn to harvest that pooling blood and feed it into their brains, they can unlock hidden power and potential that would otherwise seem alien, godly! I can turn men into living miracles!"

"Is that" Mort began "how you transported me outside of ordinary existence?"

"You're embracing the madness!" Gore said. "Yes, I replaced the reality you perceived with the one that I live in. I brought you into my world for the amount of time necessary to transport your body here."

"Then I'll be blunt" Mort said, revving his chainsaw and making it bark. "Why not do that now?"

"You're too good a man" Gore said "to be tricked twice!" Gore revved his blade up again and came in hard. He spun as he advanced and spun his weapon likewise over his head, then with all that movement behind it hen grabbed it in the proper places and smashed it into Mort's revved-up defense. The serrated teeth of the saw were biting into the metal of the chain around Mort's weapon. One of the blades was dangerously close to breaking, and where and how fast it would fly, who knows? Mort didn't like such odds and ducked down while dragging the blade away. He hopped back and then advanced with a downward slash. Gore blocked it with his weapon and threw Mort off. Mort came in again, reeling at his waist, and attacked with a horizontal strike.

_He's just trying to shatter my weapon_ Gore thought.

_BREAK, MOTHER FUCKER!!!_ Mort thought. Mort's efforts were finally realized, not by breaking the weapon, but by guiding it out of Gore's grip long enough to force it into the floor. Gore tried to pry it loose and yanked on the handle to get it out, but the paneled wood was too thick. Mort stepped to the side of the shaft and hacked at it with both blades of his saw. The string attached to the blade was broken and it coiled up on itself, snapping Gore in the hand. Finally, after so many sparks and so much hoarse shouting, the shaft shattered, the wires frayed and the sinister blade stopped. As its whine died down into a dead hissing Gore dropped to his knees and sighed.

"That's it then" Gore said. "In my old age I just can't compete with you young people. All the strength in the twisted nether world couldn't save me." Mort shut off his chainsaw and threw it away. Gore looked up at him curiously as he watched his killer reaching up for a silver-plated titanium-framed shovel with a pure, aged wooden handle and a horizontal bar at the end of the shaft to aid in powering through dirt.

"No one could save you" Mort said, his black goggles reflecting a curiously starry sky in the room. "This is the universe rejecting you. Fate is calling for a corpse to be made, and the Mortician shall answer such a beacon!" Mort used his new, perfectly balanced shovel to smash Gore's mask off. Gore was unflinching, an avatar of maddened discipline. Mort looked down at his face, and removed his black goggles speckled with sawdust. He couldn't believe his eyes.

* * *

"So" Gore began, "are you surprised?" For a man in such garb, imitating the speech and general patterns of any given white supremacist, Reverend Gore looked like an elderly black man with full, thick lips, a heavy brow of wrinkles, high prominent cheekbones and of course skin as black as crude oil. He opened his eyes, both golden from demonic magic, and raised himself up to eye-level with Mort. "Ironic, isn't it, that the Klan inspired my particular style of dress."

"Ironic?" Mort asked. "Hellishly twisted and stupid is more like it. Why would you imitate them? Are you blind or dumb?"

"I joined them, actually" Gore admitted "out of ironic protest back when I lost control of my mind. I left just before they found out I was black, though. I think someone there is still looking for me, and most of them will most likely find me in Hell."

"Ah yes" Mort said. He kicked Gore's knees in and forced him down with the point of his spade against Gore's wrinkled throat. "That reminds me. The murder. I should get to that."

"Such a light heart" Gore said "in the eyes of death. What terrible traits for a murderer."

"Who weighs the values" Mort began "of a ruthless killer, exactly? We are a breed that disregards the ratings of society, and we then carve our own ideals into the corpses of our victims! Who says killers have merit or rules!? We kill and then when we are caught killing we die, regardless of how long it takes for the shit-coated justice system to get us in the chair! Even though I have effectively defied that perpetuation of order by being spirited away by some hell-spawned demons seconds prior to my execution, the absolution of the universe remains the same!!!"

"If all men die" Gore said "and all murderers die, buy some perverse logic all men are murderers."

"Yes" Mort said in total agreement. "That is exactly it." Gore was confused, though the thick wrinkles of his face were strained in showing it. "All men are guilty of sin, and therefore they kill their innocence. If sin is not something you believe in, then all men commit karmic infractions and slowly murder their purity in the eyes of Buddha."

"What about the agnostics and atheists?" Gore asked. "Where do they fall in this debate?"

"They kill faith" Mort said sternly. "All men and women are guilty of killing something in their life. Even the most innocent and pure angel among creation has some hidden skeletons of desire or worth or fame. All people kill, but those who kill men are of an extreme class who choose to defy the regular laws of mortality. When one life is taken before its time, before fate calls for it, the world is thrown into confusion. Such killers are truly a bane to the ongoing revolution of our lives in this reality."

"I'm enjoying this" Gore whispered to himself. "Tell me, Mortician, where you and I would fall on such lines that you describe. Where innocent men kill ideals and values and truly horrific men try to kill cultures and races, how far have we strayed from that balance in the center of the continuum?"

"We _are_ the center of the continuum" Mort said. "Men who kill men are the most balanced murderers of all of them. They exorcise their emotions through brutal acts against the individual whereas Hitler tried to do the same against the Jews. The ability to grasp guilt and bury it safely inside of one's heart is the trait of a perfect killer."

"A guiltless sinner" Gore said. "A man who can sin in God's eye and be without remorse. A man who refuses to repent for things undone and unnecessary to inspect. I agree. A man who can walk the earth without feeling is a perfect killer."

"Then we have common ground" Mort said. He relaxed finally, removing the spade from Gore's throat, coming to the realization that his enemy was an ancient old man with too much time in deep thought about life and its worth. Gore wasn't as dangerous as Mort had thought, he was just manipulative to the weaker minded fools who prowled the halls before. He was just...a brilliant man. Now that Mort realized that, his victory was bittersweet.

"You've given me" Gore began "a sufficient reason to be happy, Mortician. I feel, with men like you thinning the populous herd and culling the flooding of information in the world, that I am no longer needed. My fashion was far out of date, unfortunately. However, before you send this debtor to his jail, I ask that you do it in my favorite style."

"Gas-powered?" Mort asked.

"The one on the wall" Gore began "plated with wood, the one made before the days where these machines were popularly used, that is the first tool of destruction I gained. It is not gas or electric powered, but gyro powered. A perpetual generator lies within it which pulls the chains fast enough to sever bone from flesh. It is more advanced than most instruments of its kind today. It is my favorite in this orchestra of death. I implore you, as my parting wish, I want to feel the same pain that so many have felt from me. Cut my head like a tree with that blade and I shall not resist the demons." Mort had no problem obliging. He first sheathed his new shovel on his back, then walked over and retrieved his other shovel, seeing it just as good as the other one and more sentimentally worthy. Mort then retrieved the wood-paneled metal-framed chainsaw and revved it up with the cord. The saw whined with an air-hissing silence. It was barely audible, just the metallic singing of chains moving on metal.

Just under the hum of the weapon Gore said something which Mort heard and understood, nodding at his words with a smile of affirmation. Then, in a vicious spray of blood and gore, Gore was decapitated by his beloved oldest weapon. Mort found the job infinitely easier with this weapon than any of the other chainsaws he had used before.

* * *

"The 'Gore'" Mort said. "In honor of a misguided mind, I name this weapon 'Gore'. This shovel on my back, I name it 'Penance', along with my age old weapon the 'Spade of Fate'. The winds of destiny have roared today, blowing a storm into the sky. Now those clouds have passed, and I can feel the universe shining light on me...Now how the fuck do I get out of this place?" Mort looked around, seeing no door. The more he looked the more barren and empty the room seemed, until he realized that he had been caught in an illusion and was now standing in the middle of an infinite stretch of hardwood flooring. No walls to bust through, no ceiling to break though, Mort was trapped yet again outside of regular existence.

So he sat and meditated. _Shit always happens to the man destined for greatness_ He told himself. _This is just another road bump, made of shit, that I will have to endure if I am to truly achieve my destiny..._ While Mort's eyes were closed the darkness crawled. Demons with greedy hands came from all over in an instant to reclaim the body, all of them led by some nameless creature in a full-length robe of distorted colors. Its head featured two horns that curved up and out, creating a cleft of skull directly bisecting the symmetry of its head. A crease formed where the face would be normally, and on either side of the head where the ears on a man would be this demon sported **two faces**.

"He is waiting?" the face on the left asked.

"He is thinking" the face on the right answered.

"Where will he go?" the left asked.

"We will take him there" the right said. Gore was gathered up by a gaggle of demons who passed through the floor and took his body with them. They dissolved into a bubbling blackness that led directly to hell and were gone. Mort's eyebrow twitched as the two-faced thing neared him, and curious visions passed in his mind's eye. Visions where he had seen such a figure eluding his sight before.

"The end" both faces said "draws near. Time will take no prisoners. **Nihil est Eternus. Nihil est Eternus**." Their chanting continued on while Mort steadied his soul, as his body was catapulted through the universe to some part unknown...


	55. The Perfect Killer

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

As these killers fought their selected opponents, some losing some winning and others coming to the purgatory of self defeat in between, the true face of murder stalked through the dark night streets with his hands in his pockets. The nameless painter who blasted himself outside of existence moments before arrived across town, uptown, in the most chic-douche-bag district of the city in which he dwelt. Nny, as the universe knew him, walked down an empty road where the zombie-like fear driven citizens had once been. He looked about at the abandoned scenery with a light smirk and built it into a happy smile with wide, dark-circled eyes as he stopped at a corner and stretched his arms out.

"AAAAAH!" he sighed loudly. "What a beautiful silence!"

"What a shitty town" the conscience roach-girl said. Nny turned around and saw his conscience tapping the ash off her cigarette on its long, slender rod. This time her dress was significantly more contemporary. Instead of the traditional Gothic-Victorian bell dress it was slender, form-hugging and seductive. Her ribs and concave stomach were shown plainly through the grave mud color of the dress. It didn't end, however. The color twisted into a terrible black as her gnarled root-like legs pierced through the concrete of the sidewalk like a haunted tree.

"A town is a town" Nny defended. "It's the people and the general life in the town that make it good or bad. In fact, there isn't even good or bad. You know what? Let's not talk about this. Let me just bask in the dim glow of the street lights before they get snuffed out!"

"By what?" she asked. Suddenly the stars beyond the sky were the only source of light. The moon turned pale with fright as Nny stood on the lonely street with a menacing, murderous gaze freezing his back from down the sidewalk. His roach-girl vanished in a puff of smoke and Nny's eyes went half-closed with his usual apathy to the building dread of humanity. He turned around and made a visible, glowing white smiled from the corner of each narrow eye.

"So you've arrived" Nny snarled. "**How predictable...**"

"I'm flattered, Nny" the composite voices of madness and insanity said as the figure approached. The body of a kid, no younger than 14, with a mushroom-cloud hat and swirls of disgusting paint that culminated into a jagged symbol that made Nny's eyes pop open in shock. The cryptic 'Z?' on its chest at the center of spiked ripples that led up to the horrid face-paint around its eyes and smiling mouth. "After all this time you bothered to keep the memories of me fresh in your mind. I must be a great friend to be honored with that amount of miniscule space!"

"I'm sorry" Nny began, pointing with his shadowy finger. "Who are you?"

"Ooohhh, Nny" the demon growled, "what a predictable disappointment." The fusion of Psycho Doughboy and Mr. Fuck had reached its most cruel state of self-evolution The twisted fiend began twisting further, morphing its already appalling physical form into that of a monster. Its arms exploded open, shooting plaster and plastic in all directions. Nny didn't flinch. The universe seemed to love him too much to even allow him to be hit by something as harmless as hardened foam. Thick black and white tendrils came out from the psychotic humanoid's broken arms and formed thick, spiral-stripped arms ending in ten-digit claws each. Its legs were curved back and inward like a horse's legs and had thick black hooves stomping into the concrete ground.

"Preeeetttyyyyy" Nny awed with a wide, gawking mouth full of teeth as the conglomerated monster grew and grew before him. Its body was a writhing, contorting mass of randomly moving tentacles that eventually formed into its static head. One eye had an angled spiral of black on its lightly bulging white surface. The other eye had a spike of a pupil that extended down past the bottom of the eye and formed a bolt of blackness that reached down to its smiling mouth full of disgustingly golden, straight fangs. The doughboy hat grew into a more demonic form as well. Two horns near its bottom sprouted out and locked it into place and then a crown of horns, each curving out and then up towards the sky, pierced out through the puffy top of the hat.

"**Huhuhuhu...**" the demon laughed. "**What do you think, Nny? This form of mine can easily squash you like the roach you are!!!**"

"Now let me see" Nny thought with a finger tapping his pouting lips, "which one of you wanted to kill me again? I know one of you wanted me dead, for some reason, but right now I'm having a hard time remembering."

"**Our master was killed**" they said "**because of your selfishness! Your narcissistic want to live infuriated **_**it**_** and drove us both into **_**its**_** mad embrace! Our failure resulted in this, the fusion of all three of us, so that we may walk the earth and hunt you down to finally kill you!!!**"

"Why?" Nny asked.

"**NO MORE TALKING!!!**" the Doughboy Demon shouted. It raised up one incredibly thick arm and extended its sharp tendril digits out. "**YOU DIE! DIE AND ROT IN HEEEEELL!!!!**" The hand came crashing down. Right up to the last moment Nny stood strong, glaring his foe down under his greasy brow. The road shattered at its motion. The arm and hand split apart the ground and flooring of the man-made plains. The streetlight flickered one last time before exploding with sparks and falling onto the road. Doughboy raised its hand, hoping to find a pile and pool of squashed Nny, but instead it found nothing. The ground was busted open down to the sewers where a nose-breaking stench came roaring up and an army of gut-wrenching cockroaches came skittering up from the depths.

* * *

"Who's self-centered here?" Nny asked. The demon turned around with its static smile and saw Nny, stick-limbed as always, standing on top of a brightly glowing streetlight with two of his smiley-face daggers in his crossed arms. "You just want to kill me out of anger, don't you? Now that you know you can exist without me, you don't need me, and by that logic you think I should be dead. But in reality you can't cope with losing me because I fed you and gave you a home. You're like an ungrateful dog who comes whimpering back after its owner throws it out, hoping that a shred of human decency and empathy still exists in him after that cold night he threw you out." Nny raised up one of his daggers, sharp and dangerous with the tip ending in a nasty flesh-rending hook.

"But look around!" Nny ordered. "The world has changed! Even without a proper waste-lock, humanity and society has been able to flourish in its own, incredibly stupid ways! Without me filtering out all the undesirable depression of human life the people have learned to deal with the tedious boredom of everyday life. Instead of doping up constantly the smart survivors are embracing their negative emotions and letting it pass through themselves! I have removed myself as the liver of depression and look! **The body of human life still lives!!!** No amount of drinking could drown me, but it pissed me off good! Now, with all that in mind, what would my death accomplish if not just to remove one blade of grass from an endless, flat plain???"

"**SHUT UP!!!**" the psychotic monster roared. "**IF I WANT YOU DEAD, I DON'T NEED A REASON!!!!**" The tentacles from its arm extended out and made their way for Nny. The killer grinned and lowered his knives into a lazy, dangling-armed position.

"It's gonna be one of those days, is it?" Nny said. As the tentacles surrounded Nny and prepared to wrap and strangle his thin body, Nny held his knives between his thumbs and index fingers, wrapping the other fingers tightly around the end of the handles. They were held like paint bushes, light but steady, and then he kicked off with his goat-foot boots and spun around. The blood of the monster came out in a double-helix spiral as Nny severed each of the ten tentacles in one beautiful, artistic maneuver and then vanished into the night while the monster roared in pain. Its mouth opened up wide, taking up a portion of its wiggling torso, and roared.

_**GEEEYAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!**_ The pain was terrible. Its black and white blood sprayed out, becoming indistinguishable from its skin, and stained the surrounding buildings in the terribly Gothic un-colors. The monster looked around and saw the silhouette of murder standing on a roof five stories up, his feet teetering at the precipice of an artist loft roof.

"Plenty of lofts around" Nny said, observing the empty scenery. "Must be a center for materialistic shit heads."

"**DIIIIEEE!!!**" the monster roared.

"Come up with something more interesting to say" Nny demanded. From the severed stumps of twisting psychedelic black-and-white, new barbed ends sprouted forth and twisted around each other to create a more human hand of five equal fingers. It threw that hand forward, the tendrils of fleshy skin reaching far, and grabbed at Nny. Nny simply stepped to the side and jumped to the next roof over, like some kind of perverse action anti-hero. He landed in a crouch and then got up to sprint. The darkness moved away from him as he ran across the rooftops and away from his enemy, heading for more populated territory to create more chaos than the psychotic thing could possibly handle.

"Well look at you" Nny's French conscience said. "Leaping about from roof to roof like a ninja."

"Don't remind me" Nny warned. "I'm pissed off that I'm even able to do this!" Nny continued sprinting across the rooftops, not unlike a ninja, until he saw a large group of people walking away from what seemed to be the aftermath of a spontaneous midnight poetry jam at a local douche-baggary/coffee shop. Nny landed in the middle of the crowd, being totally ignored as the universe intended, and sheathed his knives. Not until a certain young douche and his douchette, he wearing a wool cap and baggy clothes and she wearing a thick winter sweater and a crotch-length skirt with spiked stiletto boots, bumped into Nny did he enjoy the peace of his non-existence among the masses.

"Hey!" Mr. Douche said in outrage. "Watch it, stick! You nearly scuffed my shoes!"

"Your shoes?" Nny asked. "Those are more important than the efforts taken by all the authority figures in your life to raise you as a respectful, mindful individual in a world of generally malignant nutsacks?"

"They are" the man answered snottily "if they cost more than that piss-ass haircut of yours!"

"Who styled that mess?" the girl asked sarcastically, "A deranged chihuahua?" She and he went on to laugh through their nostrils, all uptight and egotistic, while Nny repelled the impulse to cut them to pieces and walk away. Instead, he insulted them in the highest regard he knew how, by scuffing the sacred shoes as he walked away with his head aimed up to the sky.

"Hey, fag!" the man shouted as he snapped around. Nny stopped and looked up at the sky.

"Those stars are beautiful" Nny said. A distant rumbling and roaring disrupted the relative tranquility of the masses and all eyes turned to the street where lights flickered and the colors seemed to somehow fade. "I was once envious of them, getting to watch all the human strangeness from so far away, yet always seeming so close. I wanted to go beyond them and watch them watch all of us, just an innocent dream to be above that which transcends humanity. I guess that selfishness is what ended up killing me...and granting me that kind of power I have."

"What's happening!?" some lady dramatically shouted.

"Is it a steamroller?" a man asked. From the darkness it came, and whatever it was, it was mean. Nny turned around and glared from the side of his lowered eyes to see the manic beast rampaging through the crowd, stomping and squishing many civilians with no regard for them, and he smiled at it.

"It seems no matter what I do" Nny lowed, drawing his knives back out, "a part of me will always exist with those selfish ambitions..."

* * *

"**A discouraging act, Johnny**" the beast lowed. It made a stomp on its hands, now using them as front feet with hideous barbed tendrils running all the way up to its writhing, tentacled shoulders. "**You honestly think these mere humans can stop me? Is this some ridiculous recruitment drive for your hopeless battle!?**"

"No" Nny said. "I just don't see the point in fighting you in some dark, abysmal alley when we could be here, where's it's all nice and shiny! It's almost like this show was staged specifically for our benefit, right? So that we could have some residual light to fight from and some unnecessary casualties to get away with!"

"Call the military!" a woman shouted. "There's some kind of monster here!"

"What the fuck is it!?" someone else shouted.

"Whatever it is" another panicking voice answered "it's not a moose!"

"HOOOOLD MEEEEE!" some frantic male bellowed. "Someone hold me! I'm so scared that I shit myself!"

"Someone shit in my pants!" someone else yelled. "They were so scared they shit right in my pants!!!"

"**Doesn't the noise bother you anymore?**" it asked.

"In a way" Nny answered "it doesn't. I suppose losing my humanity long ago gave me a strange tolerance to the imperfection of the human condition. However, that's not to say all this incidental racket is at all good for my health. If anything I'd like everyone to shut the fuck up and lie down for a nap. I mean, they've been up so late and God knows most of them are probably drunk or high..."

"Hey man" the douche from before said in a shaking voice. Nny turned and saw him and his girlfriend on the ground, curled up in the fetal position. "Can you, like, make that thing go away?"

"It burns!" the girl whispered in pain. "Looking at it burns my eyes!!!"

"Bear with it" Nny said, glowering down at them. "Oh, and don't worry, I'll try to save as many shoes as I can!" Nny turned to his monstrous foe who began to charge, ripping apart every measly human body that touched its deadly bladed fingers. Nny waited, once more, unflinching and patient, for his perfect opportunity to strike a killing blow. The beast stopped just short of Nny's range and the maniac smiled. "What's wrong? You scaaaaaared?" The mocking tone with which he spoke made the Doughboy Demon step back and snarl.

"**You're so much trouble**" the demon complained. "**Do the world a favor and die! Without your designated position in the universe there is no realistic point for you to exist!**"

"What about my opinion" Nny said. "Aren't you going to at least hear it before lording your galactic knowledge over me? Or is thinking outside of a functionalist perspective too _**confuuuuusing**_ for you???"

"**You were brought to life**" the demon began "**so that you could die, just the same as any worthless being. Your life without its intended purpose is not a life but a dismal, hopeless struggle against the infinite power of a cruel world. You are a universally shunned hobo of existence, one who exists out of the selfish want and not the driving need like the rest of these...maggots! You lack the need to live and therefore your life is worthless!**" The demon, now enraged, made a desperate sweeping strike for Nny, raking apart the majority of the crowd. Nny held out a hand with the knife pointed outward and stopped the demon's sweeping hand, impaling it with his bizarrely sharp knife. The tentacles dared not move and even drew in closer to the blade, constricting it and keeping it in place.

"The universe" Nny said "begs to differ. Like a beaten hound, it always comes to my aid...**because I was the only one to feed it in those rainy days...**" Nny's knife somehow migrated in an instant, a spacial blink of time, into the demon's lowered forehead. "You'd know about how dogs act...wouldn't you...you **dog?**" His calm, almost passive voice was interrupted by the sickening splitting of skull as Nny made a long fissure down his enemy's face. Once it ended and his knife drifted down back to his side, the monster threw itself up to its feet and heaved dryly in pain to the cruel sky.

_WHY!? _it shouted internally at the swarming stars. _WHY HIM!? WHY!!?? **WHYYYYYY!?!?!?!?!?!?**_

_**...**_

Why indeed?


	56. Sea of Insanity, the Perfect Kill

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

The city-scape had been changed. The sky overhead swirled with static clouds around a single black point where the moon used to be. The entire block Nny and his demonic apparition of the past fought on was covered and painted gorgeously with blood. Aside from Nny's own sickly-pale-yellow skin the only colors that existed anymore were black and white. He stood amongst the infinite carnage, arms cross with knives held in fists, and glared through his wide, white eyes at his demonic enemy. The thing was still reeling in pain, whimpering with its huge hands on its torn face, cursing the heavens in some strange tongue.

"You done yet?" Johnny asked. He sighed and shifted his feet, letting his arms lightly swing. "This routine is getting kinda stupid." The demon grunted loudly and blinked open its eyes. The former bizarre patterns of black on white were just the lids of the thing's eyes. Its true eyes were pools of incalculable depth and blackness ending in the dimmest nebula of tiny white specs. Eyes reflecting infinite space, the cruelest darkness of the cosmos which Nny and his demon now fought in. Its hands slammed its face back together and its terrible grin had become a snarling frown of even more wickedly jagged teeth.

"Oh?" Nny grunted. "You are done..." With a stomp of its legs the beast leaned deeply forward, its wriggling chest just above the bloody road and its arms thrown far out to the sides. Its mouth stretched all the way down to its coiling waist and it roared.

**AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!**

The rotted wind of its breath blew Nny's hair and forced his eyes to close, but he smiled and when the voice died down he started to titter.

"Was that it?" Nny asked. The beast blinked and rose back up, its tentacle body resetting itself. Now it stood five stories tall, its crown staying exactly the same as a straight-standing demented chef's hat. The mask-like bone of its face melted down and twisted around its eyes and mouth to form a constantly shifting Rorschach pattern of black and white gnarled veins. The tentacles that made up its body coiled around each other and formed a mirror-image of a human muscular anatomy in broad stripes of black and white. Its humungous arms, complete with stripped nails of particularly hard tentacle flesh on its five fingers and toes. Nny looked straight up and barely saw the glow of its monstrous eyes and teeth beyond the constantly shifting pool of black and white that was its face.

"Is _that_ it?" Nny asked. The monster raised up its leg and stomped down at Nny. Nny jumped far back, to the end of the street, and landed in a position that looked like he was going to sprint. If he weren't so damn skinny he would have looked serious.

"That seems to be it" the cockroach girl said off to the side. Nny looked back and saw her, the same as before and rooted through the rippling puddle of deep-red blood, billowing out a cloud of red smoke from her red-tipped cigarette. "Aren't you going to kill it?"

"Give me a sec" Nny said, waving her off. The monster punched into a nearby high-rise and opened its palm, sweeping out all the furniture and debris from the fifth story down into the street. Nny wasn't moved by the gesture and flipped a long-range bird to his enemy. It lowed loudly, far above the clatter of its attack, and began walking at a surprisingly brisk pace. Nny dashed into a nearby building, feeling the eyes of his enemy following him. His conscience blew one last drag from her stick and vanished in a puff of black smoke. The Doughboy creature punted the building apart, blowing debris everywhere, including towards it. Nny sat lazily on a couch that flew through the air towards his enemy's face, waiting for the universe to deliver him to his proper place. The Doughboy slapped the couch and Nny away, far down to the opposite end of the street.

"Ow!" Nny exclaimed. He was standing, rather than painfully rolling like the couch he was just on, right in the middle of the street. "Okay, that didn't work."

"Was that _it?_" she asked, once again leaning against a building and smoking.

"Knock that off" Nny apathetically said. He twirled his knives around his fingers and began walking down the street. "A monster is a monster, and the definition of a monster is completely subjective. There is no golden standard for what defines a chaotic mess of organic evolution, there simply is and are things beyond worldly evolutionary explanation, and those are all monsters."

"So in a sense" she said, "are you not a monster?"

"Of course I'm a monster" Nny admitted, stopping after walking the length of just one building. The blood had finally reached him, pouring out and reaching across the flat of the road for Nny's boots. Once the blood reached him it seemed to speed up and the lazy swirl of the black and white sky reflected down to the ground. "**Ever since I could remember, I've been nothing less than a monster!**" With his jagged, ear-to-ear smile Nny turned back and let the light fade from his face. He was two eyes and a terrible, V-shaped smile with a tangled mess of disgusting hair. He stood with feet shoulder-length apart and began slowly raising his arms up, keeping them straight and letting his wrists give in to the weight of the knives he held.

"**You're nothing but a fool, Johnny"** the monster said. Nny's knives finally drifted up and his arms were straight up. With one whip of his wrists his blades clashed in a blinding flash of white. The blades crossed over his head with the serrated teeth near the tips of the knives forming the outline of a perfectly equilateral triangle. Nny raised his head incrementally to look up at his wildly huge opponent as it stomped forward again. "**You've always been nothing but foolish!!!**" Johnny brought his knives back down, crossing his arms at his chest with the knives pointed down...and vanished. "**What!?**" the demon exclaimed. It looked around in a panic, not seeing Johnny's still active, smoking conscience at the nearby street corner. "**Where? Where did he go!?!?!?**"

* * *

"Ah, I see" Johnny said. "A Sea of Sartre." Johnny sat in the reflection, taking a seat on the highest branch of a myriad gnarled roots which all came from beneath his subconscious partner's dress. It formed a giant tree that stretched far above the cityscape and into the sky, or rather down to the sky as Nny's gravity had yet to wrong itself in this infinitely twisted realm of implausibility.

"This place" Nny began "was created by the universe at my own whim to win this fight. I can exist easily in it, as I don't follow the normal rules of existence anyway. I'm a defiant son of a bitch who takes no more shit, metaphorical or Satanical. This is an entire region of space which is an anti-thesis of the rules of reality, a place that I call home. I can do anything I wish, but right now all I want to do is kill." Nny felt the pull of gravity drift him back up to the street of blood. He landed and made the entire scene ripple as reality corrected itself around Nny's wrongs and set the new sky as his ground. He now stood at the feet of his reflected enemy and raised up his knife to stab into his unguarded, tightly-coiled tentacle mass.

"**GRAH!!!" **It shouted in pain. Something has stabbed its foot, something inhuman. It lifted up its foot and let the blood fall down like rain, but then its other foot suffered the same pain. **"GAH! JOHNNY, YOU PRICK!"**

"Who's a what now?" Johnny asked. The monster looked down to find his voice but saw nothing, save for the still flowing puddle of blood. In the Sartre Sea the ground had rippled up and immaterial blackness filled the air where the monster's foot was lifted. Whatever movement was made in the real world this strange world reflected it in chaotic and strange ways. Nny himself had shrunk as he scaled the behemoth's leg from behind. He raised up his knife and stabbed into its leg, sliding down into the Sea again where he floated as if the blood-red world was water.

"**WHERE ARE YOUUUUUU!!!!!"**

"Poor blind bastard" she said, finishing her cigarette. "You'll never find him if you don't really look." The monster made a jump and landed on the bloody surface of the road, impacting on the surface of the blood rather than driving through it and the road at once. Finally some sort of realization occurred. Because Johnny used both the ground of the real world and the sky of the Sartre Sea as a solid surface at some point, the combined tension of both through the portal made the blood that pooled the streets into the new ground.

"Still don't get it?" Johnny asked as his form slowly rose up from the blood. He as but a reflection of the self that existed just outside of existence, inside the thin pond of red. This Johnny was coated and dripping with blood and his two knives took on a much more sinister appearance. Instead of smiley faced circles holding the blade to the handle, twisted, grinning demonic faces with horns coming up from either end to end in tips on the flat ends of the blades. Everything of his now was red while the black demon stood upside down in the world below.

"**Honestly no**" the demon said, shaking its head. The red Johnny, faceless and constantly flowing with blood from its head, lowered its head while the real Johnny smiled wide.

"Good" Johnny said. Suddenly all the blood came pooling in, revealing the terribly broken ground that the demon had stomped on just before and the bodies that gave so much blood create the splendid scene. Suddenly a giant of rippling, smooth blood appeared with two huge knives in its balled fists and an eternally dripping trench coat of red. Johnny was reflected in its dead center with the skyline of a seemingly endless city spiraling behind him. He glared through wide eyes and extended his left arm out to stab. The motion carried through just how he did it, regardless to the size that it happened in, and the demon received a nastily sharp blade right through its shoulder and an equally horrific slash straight down through its waist.

There was no time for pain. Only retaliation as the demon fell deep into its darkest state of insanity. It eliminated pain from its twisted mind and retaliated with a stern punch. The giant blood-Johnny's head exploded in a sloshing liquid rain that spread all the way up to the clouds upon contact, but the giant did not falter. It didn't flinch or move. It simply let its blood form ripple into mist that clouded the still static sky. Johnny's conscience was below, on the street, with her eyes averted as if in shame.

* * *

The bloody giant reformed itself, becoming slightly shorter to compensate for losing most of its better weight. Johnny still floated in the middle, this time with the pose of a rugged martyr, arms straight out and knives held as extended from his arm instead of his hand. His head was hanging low with a grin full of menace and eyes that oozed a thick, black loathing. The giant was reformed and made its own attack, chopping off its offender's right arm. The demon raised its partially severed left arm up and swiped at the bloody Goliath, swinging directly at Nny. He didn't move. In his twisted world he watched the sky ripple around as the black and white hand of his foe passed just between worlds and then faded out to reality.

"Moron" Johnny said, standing at the black spot in the sky which the static clouds spun around. It was a moving floor, the clouds painted poorly in shades of white and gray, and the blackness Johnny stood on a perfect circle of artistic dimensions. He looked up and saw the surface of his world shrink just slightly from the attack as some of the blood in his giant had been displaced. "Eye for an eye..." Johnny growled. His giant responded by resetting itself, crouching down, and then jumping high up, casting a dreadful, red shadow across the sky only to come back down and reap the tentacle meat of its enemy from shoulder down to toe. The demon roared and let its blood darken the buildings everywhere. Johnny was still reflected dead-center in creation of de-creation and smiling quite happily.

"You're so confused" Johnny said mockingly. His giant grew the feint features of a face with round budges for eyes and a concave, angular stretch that oozed with the thick, salty blood as a smile. It reeled its arms back and began stabbing and stabbing and stabbing with the inhuman swiftness that could only come from a man who had lived his life to poke things with sharp instruments. Blood and tentacle bits came shredding out of the demon's body, oozing into a black sickness as they hit the street, darkening the already dismal city colors. "You have no idea what's going on,** do you?**"

"**I don't need to know"** the demon growled. It shrank in and instant, grabbed the racing bloody arms and squeezed them right off. The blood hit the ground, right in Johnny's vision as he leaned back lazily in the limb of a demonically gnarled tree floating in an infinite, starry space. "**All I need to do is kill you!**" Johnny yawned and hopped off the tree, right into an abyss that led nowhere but down. The giant of blood dissolved, but not in any traditional sense. It simply vanished, along with all the evidence of the struggle, all the signs of battle, all the damage in the ground and the buildings. Everything was gone, including the sky, and the Doughboy Demon found itself startled and confused in its previous form of a nastily dressed school kid.

Soon, as the scenery swirled, everything returned. Even the people, who just moments before were a mush of blood, guts and mangled flesh. They seemed to know this as well, as a wide circle formed around Nny and his current helpless victim. Nny, of course, stood in the one spot where the light of the streetlamps couldn't reach, his arms held up and his fingers extended, total darkness eclipsing his face save for the shining grin he wore.

"That's really it?" Nny asked. He laughed in a deep, low, bowel-crunching laugh that shook the humans around him with fear. Doughboy fell to his knees and dropped his hat, revealing the authentic hair on his head. "All you need to know is to kill me? But what if I can't die?" Doughboy became terrified and his eyes spiraled and shook out of control, nearly becoming static. "That's right! As if dying once wasn't enough to shake the universe, losing my humanity threw the poor bitch straight into madness! How else can you explain all the shit that's been happening?"

"You mean" Doughboy began shakily "you knew? All along?"

"I had a hunch" Nny admitted. He began walking around the limits of the crowd, who were petrified at his approach, and just looked at them. "I keep having strange visions of a hilltop and a throne, with up to six cloaked characters standing and staring me down. Right now, according to my latest vision, that number is down to four. At one point I was positive a certain chef-hatted creature was standing with them, but now I see that you were just a smudge of runaway paint that got removed in the second draft. You're nothing to my future anymore."

"So you do know" Doughboy exclaimed. He struggled to his feet and tried to retreat. Nny turned his head away with a gentle smile under the menacing darkness and weakly threw a knife that split through the air and went through Doughboy's head. While not dead or injured the demon was shaken and fell to the ground anyway.

"What's important" Nny began "isn't what I did or did not know, but the fact that I was willing to acknowledge this information as important." Nny began making his way over to the puppet to retrieve his knife. He knelt down and held the handle like a brush. "I wouldn't bother to care otherwise." He removed the knife and held it up to his face, the light now shining solely on him. He held his knife up, stepping on the paralyzed body of Doughboy, and looked at the inky blackness of his new paint as it coated his brush.

"That's disappointing" Johnny said. The people all leaned in as the lights flashed back to normal and the light was spread evenly. "Honestly...I'm getting tired of **BLACK!!!**" Something in Johnny snapped and a demon was awakened. He teleported from person to person, lunging his knives deep into their brains and twisting as he pulled away. The people all died rapidly, some trying to run and getting a swift slice to the throat. Others tried desperately to fight back with their own knives or guns but they were instantly sliced apart and reduced to headless torsos that exploded with blood. The street soon ran red with blood, and with no gutters to dirty up an otherwise perfectly clean and douchy neighborhood the blood simply pooled into the street and formed a shallow puddle which, in the end, the King stood triumphant in with his knives down and his eyes wide and glowing.

Still unable to move, Psycho Doughboy laid face-down in the blood and passed out, dying from the extreme existential exhaustion brought about by Johnny's relentless assault from an alternate reality. The cockroach girl was finally happy and stepped out into the street with dead-blue legs in grave-black heels. She had her cigarette-stick in her mouth and a smile on her face.

The King of Killers strikes!!!


	57. Repulsive Resurrection

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

A dark room with a blood-stained floor. Somewhere departed from the normality of existence, separate from the entirety of the universe, a room that held a door leading nowhere. This is where the curious Angel found herself the next morning, being escorted by the fading shadows of some Mafioso-suited demons. Once she was inside the door behind her slammed shut and she flinched with a jerk of her shoulders. Her eyes were worriedly fixated on the scene within the room. A large metal bench held the torn, slaughtered remains of what looked like a human being. The arms were surgically cut open and the organs were all labeled with post-it notes, one of which being 'Squeedley-Spooch' and another 'Gag-bagger'.

"What is this place?" Angel asked. From the darkness of the single-lightbulb lit room stepped, in unison, a troop of slender men dressed in identical suits. Slick leather pants hugging their thin, womanly legs and revealing their manly bulges, and white snake-skin belts. They wore matching neon-red undershirts under their sleek leather jackets which connected only at their belt buckles, leaving a wide V split to reveal their frail-looking bodies. Each wore one black, fingerless glove on their left hand and the zombified rot that made them demons on their right. Their faces were bound with Sumerian-scrawled wrappings and funky Fedora hats. They made a perfectly synchronized routine of steps, leg jerks, hat adjustments, heel-spins and finger snaps as they advanced choreographically toward Angel.

"This place" a falsetto man's voice said "is the culmination of umpteen years of occult research! This place is a wonderland of blasphemy!"

"But where am I?" Angel asked cluelessly. The zombies formed a tight line and continued dancing, reaching and moon-walking, perfectly timed splits and hangman raises, point-and-shuffles and other disco-age dances. Then, they stopped, left hand tipping the brim of their hats and right hand clutching at their bulges. They started sliding and snapping their left hands with each inching step until they formed a sort of inhuman hallway that led straight to the metal table. Angel looked behind her and found a chair which she sat on. She had a biting feeling that she would be here for a while and didn't want to stay standing.

"You are here" the voice said again. This time, from behind the metal table a slightly more human figure came, first spinning with his glistening silver-banded Fedora tilted to cover his face save for his supple looking lips and his short, curly black hair. "You are in our nightmarish dreamworld, **Wonderland!!!**" The man came spinning and leaping forward, landing in front of her and signaling the rest of his apparent staff to engage in a perverted thrusting dance with his blue-gloved right hand at his groin and his blue-gloved left clutching his hat. He pushed and thrust his crotch right at Angel, who simply sat and timidly watched, then he kicked up his knee, slapped it down and spun around uncountable times on the heels of his red-leather shoes. Finally he stopped and the zombies all around took a sliding knee with their hands in the same positions as before and their backs and heads arching far back.

"Welcome" he greeted, leaning in with his hat over his face. He finally removed it and revealed his soft, light-brown lips in a curly smile. Above those was **rot, a deathly shade of pale, plagued green which had empty eye sockets and a two chewed-away tunnels as its nose.**

"Oh" Angel said, acknowledging what seemed obvious. "You're Michel Jackson, aren't you?"

"No" the demon said, leaning back and standing straight, his outfit the same as his comrades but seeming much more glamorous and somewhat regal. "I am one of the many ghostly muses, the one who visited a young boy Jackson in his dreams to grant him the gift of inspiration for his destined stardom! In a sense, Micheal Jackson is an imitator of me! I am **Dizi** (Dee-zee), the traitor muse of Dance!" The zombies and Dizi began shuffling once more, dipping low and then doing a shoulder-shrug shake as they rose up to stomp.

"But" Angel began "Micheal Jackson didn't direct or choreograph _Thriller_. Micheal Peters did." Her observation caused the entire line to halt suddenly. Dizi looked over through his eyeless holes.

"So?" Dizi asked.

"So how could inspiring Michel Jackson" she continued, urging her point across with a semi-whining insistence "lead to that dancing when all he did was follow someone else's directions?"

"Consider this" Dizi said, pointing his long finger down at her while shaking his hips in rhythmic alternation. "A muse is the same as any other demon with free passage to the over world, we all work in mysterious ways. God doesn't even work anymore, and that's some insider information f or you to consider! Good or evil, right or wrong, in contemporary society they don't matter! A demon's inspiration is just as good, if not better, than any angel's!"

"That isn't quite the point" Angel said, innocently staring up his finger. He shuffle-hopped away and stopped dancing with his left hand on his hat, bringing it down over his face and his right hand's thumb looped in his indistinguishably leather belt. What kind of leather it really was was better left to one's own strange imagination.

"You must be wondering" Dizi began "just why you are here, am I right?"

"For once" Angel said. She stood up and brushed off the back of her fluttery skirt. "I was brought here instead of Hell. Is this where I will spend eternity to pay my parent's penance?"

"No" Dizi answered. "In fact, if you do well enough in your assigned job, you will have no penance. We'll even make an honest girl out of you **and send you to heaven!**" Angel was overcome with a confusing joy. She was ecstatic to believe what the demon offered her, but then again, there were surely a myriad of proverbs about trusting a demon...and one that looks like MJ, no less...

* * *

The zombies revealed themselves to be incredibly confident undead surgeons. Having brought themselves back into living animation through their previous life's knowledge of the body, each one was magically bound to life by the ancient spells the greater forces of Hell had granted them. They displayed their skills by expertly reassembling the mangled body like a jigsaw puzzle.

"What am I suppose to do?" Angel asked as she was placed in a seat to observe the goings-on of the entire disgusting procedure.

"Your role" Dizi answered form the wall he leaned against "is to accomplish what these good men cannot. This cretin was retrieved by the forces of Hell after his defeat at the hands of the four Killers. His name is **'Squeegee the Clown'**, and he is an important property of our forces here."

"He was a target?" Angel asked.

"Yes" Dizi said, stepping forward and sinking down with bent knees, angling one arm with a slight bend and the finger pointing straight up. "He was the first target, the first to die! His death created a paradox within the rules, as all four Killers were proved to kill him in some way. Therefore, he is a contested murder. Our aim...is to **bring him back **and settle this dispute by sending him back into the game with an all new arsenal of deadly powers and weapons."

"So you want me" Angel said flatly "to manipulate his inactive brain tissue to force him back to life."

"You are quick" Dizi said, leaning against the wall once more. "No wonder you got away. In fact, you're the only target to survive this round. Hell, baby, you're the only one to survive thus far, and you turned yourself in! Maybe that's why Satan is so willing to give you up."

"Is that so?" Angel said. She clutched at her unbeating heart and looked down with sadness. Noticing the water flowing form a surgical sink she made her way over and looked into the mirror. Her normal face was reflected, not the hideous demonic visage from before. She took a soft touch to her face and ran one of her hands under the anti-bacterial Hell-water. With their work done, the zombies parted from the table and formed a dancing semi-circle in wait for Angel to play her part. She scrubbed her hands and splashed the water onto her face.

_So it was always true, right?_ Angel thought as the thick shades of blue from her face fell down into the sink as globules and then dissolved away. She took a good, long look at her face with its soft and innocent features, among them her sad eyes and thin lips, and she sighed, brushing the water off her hands onto her dress. She remembered her parents, always pushing her to be more than she was, beautiful beyond human limits, and then she remembered things she never knew, namely the day her parents sold her soul to the faceless demons of Hell. _Those lies to cover up your sins...they were true? It takes more than chemicals and make-up to make a girl like me truly pretty...the fact they hid form me was that it truly takes nothing. **I am beautiful.**_

As her demeanor shifted from her normal depression and darkness Angel's fashion-heavy blue outfit turned into a plain yet clingy white dress, all of the color fading and the fabric coming from the spots where her sterile hands touched. She saw herself change and her hair return to its natural brown color at last, lifting up in all directions as if caught by a heavenly breeze. She felt not the power to flood fear into the minds of many but rather she felt a coursing warmth through her body. Not the usual chill of her previous powers but something comforting and new.

Joy. The power to bring life to the lifeless was now hers! Angel LeVieca had truly become a divine creature in this pit of unimaginable Hell, and to keep herself as such she walked over to the corpse of the Clown himself, placing her hands on his rot-green head.

"Feel life" she whispered, a white mist snaking from her lips and into Squeegee's nose. "**Feel...Love..."** Monitors came to life with building beeps and rolling electric waves. Gauges and meters became active and needles moved around the center of a dial. All the signs of life became apparent and increasingly well as the white energy continued drifting form Angel to Squeegee. Then and accident occurred. Fear came back into Angel's mind. Her eyes slowly opened as she was calmly taken from her calm place and then she was thrown into Hell as the bulgy fingers of the Clown wrapped around her throat.

"**Yeeeeeesssss**" Squeegee growled in an entirely demonic helium-induced voice. "**I can feel it all...but I want to feel MOOOOOOREEEE!!!!!"** Angel panicked and tried to break away but couldn't. She felt despair over he betrayal and shame from trusting the demons who damned her in the first place. All the lies of her life she finally knew the truth: there was no God, just devils in disguise.

"**HEE!**" Divi shouted. With a stylish double-kick that led into a spinning wrist slap he blew the limbs of the resurrected Clown away freeing Angel and then catching her in his still extended hand. He spun with her in a tight embrace and then let her go to be caught by the rest of the zombie-surgery guard. Angel looked up and saw Dizi defending her from his own piece of work, the very creature he had strove to recreate. "Now that ain't nice, boy. You're gonna have to re-learn some manners if you want a shot at revenge. **HOO!**" Dizi kicked up the arm he had knocked onto the floor and shoved it back into position. Threads came out and reattached the arm. Squeegee looked over with his bulging eyes and nasty rows of teeth, waiting for the other limb. Angel stepped herself away from her protectors and sighed with relief. Now the truth she dreaded turned into a lie: good beings did exist in either Heaven or Hell.

"You pick yourself up" Dizi commanded as he spun around to check on Angel. "Good job, sweety-cake. Just hold yourself tight and I'll get you a good ride home. You're an angel now, Angel. Are you happy?"

"Very" Angel said. She had to sniff back some tears, but knowing how fruitless hiding her emotions in front of a demon was she just let herself bawl in happiness. "I'm very happy..." The zombies all fell to the floor, taking their hat off and shaking them at the wrist while Dizi slid down into a split and twirled one leg around so he could lounge in front of her, creating a somewhat epic scene of dramatic emotion with Angel's tears at the center.

"You call that choreography?" Squeegee growled in his tough, manly voice. "I call that gay!"

* * *

Finally the morning after the harrowing ventures of the killers came. Their victims were tallied and the results of the fights were given to his dark lord Satan, who was kept within his home with his two sons on their day off from school. Mysteriously an entire group of up-town party goers was found utterly slaughtered and left to bleed out all their blood in the middle of the street. No one had any leads, as all the street-side cameras suffered extreme technical malfunctions around the time of the slaughter. Todd stayed in Pepito's room playing games, waiting for his friend RoninMusashi to come on. Little did he know that he, and the other killers, were all downstairs waiting outside Satan's main office. The dark lord himself was sifting through a stack of papers and authorizations brought to him by Remsius, his apparent confidante.

"Why do I" Stan groaned "have to clean up after this shit?"

"It's your job, sire" Remsius said, not picking up the sarcasm. "Whom shall I bring before his great darkness first?"

"All of them" Satan answered. "Make sure they are ready for some chewing out, too. I have a sneaking suspicion that one or more of them had cheated."

"Oh really?" Remsius remarked sarcastically. "I would have never known." He went out the door, Satan sneering at him the whole way, and intruded unwittingly on Satan's wife handing out freshly baked cookies. Yvonne took one with fake gratitude, Sam politely declined, Mort took a few and Tom declined rather demurely. "All of you up" Remsius commanded. They all slowly stood up and made themselves relatively presentable for meeting with Satan himself. Remsius bode them to follow him with his multi-skin stitched finger and they went after him slowly. Pepito and Todd ducked around the corner and watched them all trail off around the corner into the office of the damned.

"What's going on?" Todd asked.

"Work stuff" Pepito said with a bored sigh. "Father is always doing something stupid and work-related like this, bringing serial killers and metal patients into the house and interviewing them for some random shit. I don't care." Todd stopped just in front of the bedroom door while his brother went on and shut the door on impulse. Then he opened it and looked at Squee. "What's up?"

"Has he" Todd began "been frequently finding people with insomnia to interview?"

"Yeah" Pepito said "and they babble a lot, too. They're all really, really skinny and malnourished." Todd's brow creased. He began thinking at rapid intervals and the air around him took on a fearful and disturbed stink.

"Have any of them" Todd asked once more "ever mentioned me?" Pepito stared straight ahead, thinking passively, and finally answered his brother with a flat and short

"Nope." Todd sighed heavily and the burdensome energy lifted. Pepito suddenly grabbed his arm and yanked him along. "Now come on! If we don't kick Lena's ass and put her bitching to an end, no one will!!!" Pepito forced his brother into the virtual world once more and locked the door. Downstairs a meeting to determine the bends of the cosmic river of fate took place. Four pillars of severe injustice stood firm in front of Senor Diablo himself as the grilling began...


	58. Chew out the Flaws

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Now the four killers stood in front of their benefactor, the illustrious, demonic god of all unfortunate hellish creation, the Devil himself, Senor Diablo. He tapped the tips of his fingers together as he laid his wrists on his desk. His black eyelids were half-drawn over his misty-white eyes as they glared down the nervous killers.

"I" Senor Diablo began "am going to assume that you know I have nothing good to say to any of you and start with you, Yvonne."

"What did I do!?" Yvonne demanded.

"You are under suspicion" Satan replied "of cheating in your match, which was in the end a failure."

"Failure...?" Yvonne asked. "I was sure she was dead, though!"

"You didn't see her die?" Satan asked.

"I assume" Sam interrupted "that I failed as well, despite all my hard work and effort, because my target killed himself." Tom had a remark planned out but the shocking state of his emotions forced him to remain silent. The vision of himself shooting himself in his own head had fucked him up bad.

"Damn" Mort lowed. "None of us succeeded, did they?"

"You did" Satan said directly to Mort. "You were the only one who ended up directly ending the life of his victim."

"I was?" Mort said in surprise. "But...he surrendered! I didn't take his life, he gave it to me!"

"So long as you killed him" Satan said. "That is the entire point of these 'games' I am holding. I want to see which of you is indeed the greatest **killer**. Negotiators are fine but I have relationship experts working for me on television to coerce the gullible masses into demonic pacts and suicide."

"Really?" Mort asked. "I suppose that makes sense."

"Let's get back to me" Yvonne said, eager to be the center of attention, even if it was negative.

"Yes" Stan droned, "let's." He reached into her hair and grabbed at the small cockroach in it as it struggled to release itself. Satan eyed it over intently, then snapped his eyes back up to Yvonne, who was innocently standing with her hips cocked and her head tilted.

"A bug?" Sam asked.

"In more ways than one" Satan said. He placed the insect on the floor and waited. In an instant Beelzebub erupted into his true form and bumped his head onto the low study ceiling. "I apologize for that" Satan said, and with the motion of his hand expanded the room's dimension two-fold.

_I am fine_ Beelzebub said. _Yvonne will be alright as well, sill she not?_

"She may" Satan replied "get out of this alive...but chances for her look **dim**." Yvonne gulped in panic and tried to step away. Beelzebub caught her retreat and shook his head at her, signaling disappointment, which in turn forced her to stomp back into position and stand at the ready to absorb whatever blow Satan would throw.

"Bring it on!" she shouted. "So I cheated? So what! In the end I was still an efficient, ruthless killer! Tell them, Beelzebub, of my accomplishments."

_She did_ Beelzebub began _kill a large number of innocent, madness-driven civilians in the pursuit of her target Angel, and she killed them quite efficiently. She also used superfluous methods to bring her target down upon learning of her ability to link their emotional minds together._

"Thank you" Yvonne said with a slight bow.

"Superfluous" Mort said aside to her "means 'above the necessary', in other words, _un_necessary."

"Fuck off, alien!" Yvonne shouted with a middle finger.

_She has also honored our agreement_ Beelzebub said _to allow me to meet with the leading force of destiny and fate on this planet so I may find my own while I am here._

"You mean me?" Satan asked.

_I assume it is you_ Beelzebub said.

"I am honored" Satan said "that I am so well recognized by the universe as a whole." Satan turned away from his new visitor who stood tall beside his desk and stared down Yvonne once more, trying to get back to the main point of the matter. "Now then, Yvonne, for cheating I can't rightly punish you, as the rules of this competition only include killing your given target. However, because you failed in that regard, your punishment will be three days in **Stasis Shock**." Mort became surprised at the mention, and even Tom looked up in recognition.

"What's that?" Yvonne asked. "Sounds like some pompous, stupid screen name."

"Etymologically" Sam began "it sounds like the trauma brought on by staying in a frozen state of stasis for too long, like sickness after being unfrozen in cryogenic sleep."

"The name is incidental" Satan said. "'Pain Torture' was too vague and the Hellish term 'Omni-Rectal Rape' was too...idiotic. The process involves separating you in the most remote parts of the world among a tight cult of protectorate followers of hell so you may go through a certain ritual wherein your **body will channel all the physical suffering throughout the world**."

"That's quite a mouthful" Sam said. Yvonne suddenly became grim and full of dread. The description enough was painful to hear, but the thought of enduring such inexplicable pain was too much for Yvonne to even fully form.

"Sam," Satan continued, "you fought well and were able to return a host of souls back to Hell from their purgatory of walking the earth."

"So that's where they went" Sam said.

"At some point" Satan said "we lost our contact with you and were unable to track your movement and motions, around the time you were captured by Van Gott's minions. We do, however, know the end result of your quest and that you failed to properly kill your target."

"He was immortal" Sam said. "I shot him in the face but he got right back up, even after falling several stories to the concrete ground."

"He still wasn't dead" Satan said. "Therefore, you will join Yvonne in her torture."

"Very well" Sam said with a humble bow of his head. "I guess I deserve it for not killing something that wouldn't die." Satan seethed at the sarcasm but held back the impulse to slap Sam with his long, thin arm.

"Lastly" Satan said, directing himself to Tom, "I must unfortunately give you the same treatment, Tom. Even though you are shocked by the result of battling Jormungandr you still failed to kill him. You will go with Yvonne and Sam promptly after this meeting. Rest assured, however, that none of you will die in this torture. It is just that, a punishment for your failure."

"An means with no end?" Sam asked somewhat sarcastically.

"Exactly" Satan answered. "It is exactly that." Sam was taken aback and shifted his face from the usual blankness to a twitch of surprise. Pointless torture seemed to be his mental weak-point of understanding.

* * *

"Wait a moment" Mort began aggressively "Mr. Satan."

"Senor Diablo" the devil corrected. "It is my preferred term."

"Sorry" Mort said. He got back into his assertive mood and approached the desk with dignity. "This all seems somewhat wrong to me. It doesn't feel like a victory!"

"Murder" Satan said "in the name of a ruthless world should never come with a feeling of success. If anything you should feel hollow about killing an old man who could barely defend himself. Thomas, you are spot on in feeling, as you feel overwhelming despair and confusion from watching your clone kill himself in the angst of losing to his lesser half." Tom looked up and looked worriedly over at Sam and Yvonne. He didn't want everyone to know that yet, that he was the inferior of all his potential brethren and that it was his destiny not to succeed their legacy but to never come to know it and live in the darkness of ignorance so he wouldn't screw it up. The shame made him stifle his tears, much to Yvonne's shock and dismay.

"You" Satan said now to Mort "were the only one to kill your target and walk away unscathed. Therefore, you are the only victor here in terms of what I have ruled to be a victory. In truth victory in murder is something not often won. Even in war when one side wins over the other there is always the heavy burden one must shoulder in carrying those lost souls, all striving for a chance at fleeting peace, through one's life. No matter how you ended it the ultimate result would have to be the same, if you were human."

_I see_ Beelzebub said, still broadcasting his thoughts into the room as a whole. _This is a test to see who among you is the least human through the exercise of murder. And at the same time, as I understand, you do the Devil's dirty work in collecting the souls whose owes are due._

"I was saving that" Satan lowed "for after everything was over and done, but yes, that is the gist of this contest..."

"I don't understand" Mort admitted. "Why chose humans if you aren't looking for one at all? Why not choose an applicable candidate to control the human negative, like a bear or a muskrat?"

"Or a beaver?" Yvonne asked.

"Aren't you the beaver here?" Sam said in a rare occurrence of rather sophomoric wit. Yvonne felt the urge to snap his neck with her titanium bat but held back as she actually found the joke to her own liking.

"Animals cannot perceive emotions" Satan said "in the way a human can. Even a monkey can feel sadness, but it will just as quickly feel happiness over the same thing that made it sad. It doesn't know any better. Humans understand the raw power and tenacity of emotions better than any other creature in existence."

"I heard dolphins" Yvonne blurted out "can help in emotional therapy because they can understand a human's emotions."

"That's a load of shit-pudding" Satan said. "Dolphins are morons and are just happy to have company."

_I can't vouch for this exactly_ Beelzebub began _but I have rarely encountered a species that shows as broad a range of emotions as humans do. I have at one point seen a species that thrives on the excitement of discover, living on a planet that is nearly 80% desert, but only because their way of life is situated as such. They are nomads who roam their world endlessly searching for something that they have never before seen. Humans tend to see everything worth seeing in one place at one time and therefore their emotions are limited later in life to only a few essential ones used in everyday life._

"Those emotions" Satan said "being depression, anger, humor and apathy. The only ones a working man needs to survive in the cubicle world."

"Indeed" Sam agreed. "I suppose we were all chosen because we were the _least_ human humans available, correct?"

"Yes" Satan said. "That is correct. You each posses a particular quality that allows you to separate drastically from the rest of the average humanity, namely your heinous acts in the past that have lent themselves into your current personalities."

"My service" Sam said "in the rebellion as an outside force...that was enough to decrease my humanity. So, under that logic all killers should be applicable. Why a business man, a bitch, a gaming freak and an occultist serial killer?"

"You know yourselves" Satan said "better than I do. What is your most human quality?" The four looked deep within themselves and found nothing. Within their dark hearts there was nothing human available for them to flaunt. Sam was unfeeling, even to the suffering of benevolent ghosts, Tom was only a fragment of a human being, Yvonne had memories that eradicated her humanity locked deep away and Mort had to look deep down into his own personal abyss as he found himself to be **far above humanity.** "Exactly..." Satan lowed.

* * *

The three failures of murder went off and away for their vacation from solace and left the known world at once. Mort watched the limo pull out of the driveway in the oddly cool and breezy afternoon with his arms crossed. He did not bare the face of a winner, rather his expression partially hidden by his black goggles was one of anger. He looked as if he was the only one to lose and Satan, now in one of his many disguises as a nefarious door-to-door salesman, was quick to notice his scorn.

"What's wrong with you?" Satan asked under the snidely lip of his current skin. "You should be proud. You overcame your humanity just long enough to gain a positive edge in the competition."

"Yes" Mort said. "Happiness is one of those more fleeting essential human emotions, isn't it? Well, if I'm going to win this at my utmost effort I'll need to get rid of that emotion, won't I?"

"I'm not saying" Satan said "that you shouldn't be happy. In such a life you _need_ to be happy or everything goes to shit. What you need is control. Go back to your dwelling and do what you do best to clear your conscience."

"Kill?" Mort asked.

"Meditate" Satan corrected "you large, coal-skinned buffoon." Satan then went back inside his home and prepared to remove his skin when he heard a phone ringing in the drawn-away corner of his study. "Could it be...?" he whispered. Using his trans-human speed he made his way to the study and dashed behind his desk to pick up the most curious and Goth-ornamental phone. He picked it up and pushed it to his ear. Demonic whispers and mumbles echoed from the receiving end into his ear. With each passing moment the devil's breath became harder, deeper, and much more angry as his skin cracked to reveal the shining black light of his purest, most horrible form.

"How far away is he now?" Satan asked in a greatly distorted voice. The voice echoed back in a short answer, prompting the dark lord to smash his table in and leave the debris suspended in mid-air. The books began floating off the shelves and into the air where they burst into flames for no real reason. "Have there been any sightings since then?" he demanded once more, now stomping around in a panicking pace. The books began crackling with fire slower and slower until they stopped and the light from the ceiling lamp became dim and dark.

"**Where is he?**" Satan growled in his most demonic tone. The voice on the other end must not have known, for a terrible power erupted from the dark lord which was far too difficult for any amateur author to describe. Utter terror and doom resonated far and wide throughout the city, causing a freak thunder storm, and all the citizens were thrown into instant stats of bizarre discomfort and peril. All but a few. Namely, those residing at point zero of the doom-explosion, Todd, Pepito and Satan's own wife who only heard a low growling shout, Devi who worked tirelessly painting, her roommate who was still busy mating, Mort who exited a taxi that crashed and killed the driver who was driven mad...and one particular individual who remained unfound.

"Eh?" Johnny grunted looking up at the sky. He held in one hand his head, laxly laying back into it on a park bench and in the other a fresh Jumbo Freezie of delicious red slush. He looked curiously, as if the sky was trying to call him, and stood up at last, placing the straw in his mouth and taking a long, desired sip of his covetous slushie. "Is someone...mad at me?" The cosmos shifted drastically this day. The man who was gone, Johnny C, returns to the city but remains undetected. The absolute form of the human negative was killed just last night, resetting an eternity of work in culmination, and three of four cosmic forces were sent away to suffer.

God only knows what will happen next...


	59. The D is for Destiny, methinks

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

The day seemed to freeze indefinitely in the sunny, cloudless afternoon. A day of such dry heat that the less outside-friendly were inclined to stay inside and complain endlessly about trivialities in their lives on the internet. One such recluse, though not one who was prone to whine, had set out into the world on a whim of boredom, dark circles under her eyes. Devi D found her reflection to be a hideous evolution from humanity. No longer was she remotely womanly but the walking shadow of some pitiful, hollow faced soul. Her sleepless nights and developing insomnia greased her hair and undid her light touches of femininity.

She was mostly disgusted because she so closely resembled Johnny C of so long ago. She tried to seem different in some way by letting her long, purple hair down but as the tie dropped from her hand she saw, in the reflection of a bookstore window, just how deeply into that dangerous territory she had tread. She looked like a maniac deprived of sunlight and social interaction, although thankfully her hands weren't stained with the endless stream of blood and gore that the actual man had accumulated. They were stained instead with the faded, chalky crust of ancient unwashed paint from her tedious and endless work at her canvas. She entered the bookstore, searched for a few minutes, and found a book on art and psychology.

"Will that be all?" the preppy, inattentive clerk from community college asked.

"Yes" Devi dryly droned.

"Do you have a Special Savers card" the girl unenthusiastically asked "or would you like one?"

"No" Devi droned back.

"You can save up to 40 percent-"

"Just give me the fucking book!" Devi suddenly shouted. She left the store book in bag and hand on face, ashamed of her outburst. "I cannot believe myself. Have I really regressed that much...? Am I really such a cunt that I can't have patience with an innocent, dimwitted girl behind a counter?"

"Patience is overrated" a gravely voice said. Devi turned to it and saw a tall black man leaning against the wall, wearing studded bracelets and a mock-jersey for someone named 'Zombie' whose number was a picture of a brain. An Afro-American Goth...she hadn't seen one of those before. "You can't be patient with all of the people all of the time. Just save that patience for the people who matter. It's all about venting."

"Thanks" Devi said, giving herself a sarcastic tone. "You've really changed my life. I promise now to be a total ass to anyone who isn't important and no matter what I'll get the gold, even if those Russians beat me in the first round I'll make a miracle comeback."

"You know I'm right" the black man said as he turned the corner into the bookstore. He entered and pulled out a wool cap to wear inside. Devi sighed and shook her head. No sooner had she crossed the street when gunfire rang out from within the store. The police came swiftly and an stand-off ensued where the black man, mask over face, held an impressive looking gun up to the head of the panicking, struggling young girl who had upset Devi.

"Gimme SPACE!" he demanded. "This bitch get's frosty if anyone tries a stupid move! I ain't no Buddha! I ain't got time! I want some compensation and a discrete ride out of town or this whole damn store gets pumped full of bullets!!!" The police shouted inaudible words from their garbled megaphones as the villain reentered the building with the crying girl in his arms. Devi watched the scene with curiously pursed lips, then turned and walked away.

"That's what **he'd** do" she thought aloud. "I'll just ignore it...for now..." No one noticed her enter or leave. Her existence had become so unimportant at that point in time only a fellow misunderstood recluse who hid in and consumed shadows could relate to her nullified existence. Now with her head hung onto her chest she made her way back to her apartment to read up on the symbolism of the images her nightmares conjured up each and every night. She walked along the sidewalk, ignoring the world around her, until the world could no longer be ignored.

"Going somewhere, little lady?" a graveled southern voice asked. A Cowboy in the traditional garb of the class leaned with his back against a broken streetlamp. Symbolism was there somewhere, but without reading the book Devi couldn't tell where. He tipped his hat brim with a finger, revealing his rough-n'-tough Freddy Mercury mustache, and gave her a gentleman's eye. "You look a little down. With all this violence talk goin' on today I wouldn't want you goin' somewhere dangerous or alone."

"I'm never alone" Devi began sincerely "with Jesus in my heart." She held back waves of inappropriate snickers at such an awful joke's expense and waited for the Cowboy to respond. He scratched at his thick sideburns and cocked his hips.

"Funny" he began, "you don't look like a religious girl."

"Don't you worry none" Devi said, playing on his accent. "No harm's gonna come of me tonight, I do declare..." Devi began walking away, but then she heard the scoffing huff of the Cowboy as he began a tearful tangent.

"I didn't mean ya no disrespect" he said, obviously unpolished in saying the word 'disrespect'. "I was just tryin to be a nice guy, ya know, a gentleman. I ain't seen none nowhere anytime recent. It's like there ain't no good people left in the world...and here I was just tryin ta shoulder that burden so that maybe, just maybe, a nice lookin' girl like yerself would stay and talk to me a spell. Maybe trade some warm stories or be nice and invite me back ta her place for a cuppa coffee...I never wanted ta get hert nun..."

"Hey, woah" Devi said, trying now, of all times, to be empathetic. "I'm so sorry. I'm having a bad day today. I didn't mean to take it out on you, honestly. I'm sorry."

"Don't bother" the Cowboy sobbed. He leaned his hed against the lamp and headbutted it with sobs of pain and loneliness. "The world don't needs men like me no more! Good bye, li'l lady!"

"What?" Devi said. The Cowboy pulled out a gun, a real one, and aimed it up at his head. "What!? Wait!" Too late. Devi's coldness had killed another man today. She wasn't sure if anyone died at the book-store hold up but the man whom she inadvertently provoked wouldn't exit such a situation unscathed...such was the world...

* * *

The evening fell onto the land like a heavy wet mattress, suffocating the life out of the city. Since last night's horrific slaughter uptown no one dared to venture outside and professional law-enforcement officers were patrolling the streets every hour of each day in a vow to find the terrorists who invaded the fair city. They were idiots, obviously, trying to keep the peace through the illusion of order. Or, at the very least, they were hired and placed under their positions _by _idiots. Devi didn't stay out long, just the walk for her book, and when she finally got to her door she found that it didn't need to be opened. Tenna's expertly timed service of angry men storming out just as Devi returned fulfilled her every portcullis need.

"Oh yeah!?" the man of average dimension and douchey haircut shouted. "Well fuck you, bitch!"

"If you didn't do that" Tenna shouted in a rage "you wouldn't have those herps, would you!?" Devi entered the room to her room mate wrapped in her bed sheet and wearing an extra-spiteful scowl. Once she was in and her shoes were off Tenna calmed down and smiled, her plan to stay uncommitted had worked once again. Devi closed the door just as Tenna gave her a happy wave. "Guys are stupid, eh Devi?" Devi didn't have it in her to give a skeptical or sarcastic reply. She just took her book out and removed her jacket and walked over to her room. "You want a nude model, Devi? I'm ready for it this time."

"No" Devi said, creaking open her worn out art-room door. "Ten, do me a favor, just for tonight, and don't talk to me. I'm feeling a weird, psychotic funk right now and I don't think interaction would help me get better."

"Got it" Tenna said. "Isolation for the isolationist. I'll barricade your door in case you decide to kill me too."

"Good idea" Devi said. She closed the door and locked it once she was sure it clicked. Her art room was a chaotic flood of paint and canvas sheets. Her works from the previous nights covered the floor and made a carpet. Her walls were covered in unfinished drafts which barely clinged to the life of her attention with their pencil-sketched hands reaching out constantly, as if their placement had been planned. Even the ceiling had some cover with the haunting fuck-ups Devi made in previous attempts looming over her like disgraced and dissatisfied gods full of ill-wrought contempt. In the center of the room stood five canvases on which her most recent works would stand. Behind the center easel was the window which held the brilliant scenery of the building next to hers and its never-washed gringy sides of brick and mortar.

The room resonated with pent-up insane energy, a defiance to the universes plan which had been long ago set in motion for the starved artist. The Sickness which infested her now lingered in each breath she took and in each step she dared in the brave and exciting world. It was inside her, more specifically in her bowels, a swelling sensation of incalculable dread. The feeling that brings premonition to the most painful and excruciating bowel movement you know you will _ever_ have to stay conscious through. Terrible pain of knowledge, the dreadful facts of the arcane, a whimsical knowing...she felt **sick of the universe.** She gave out a loud, long sigh and bent down with her book to gather up the passable works of art on her floor to move them into a neater pile somewhere in a corner, if possible. She noticed as the edges of the heavy canvas moved that the window had been opened and the stink of the outside was hurting her delicate sociopath sinuses. She bent back up to close the window, the window in which **he was kneeling.**

"Hi there" Nny said. Devi felt weightless. Her gut drifted up into her skull and she felt a sharp vomit coming up. Nny waved his hand in a flash of black movement and banished gravity. Devi's body felt normal and now she found herself floating with a stable base beneath her, providing her with a surface on which to stand while existence went to shit. Nny walked towards her through an eternity of darkness and bright, sparkling stars. He plucked a painting form the air, blowing the rest away but the one she stood on into the eternal void all around, and he gave it a stern looking over with his artists eye.

"Looks like you've been practicing" Nny said. "You've gotten a lot better! I approve!" He threw the painting away, still walking on nothing but still casting his shadow unevenly across the rolling space. Devi looked around, her pupils warping into random shapes while leaving her vision unaffected, as far as she could tell, and then looked down. 'Z?' is what she stood on, with the original image splattered around the edges in dirty, bloody splotches and splatter of deep red and black. She couldn't speak, lest the vomit roll out of her throat and stain the universe with its chunky substance.

"What's wrong?" Nny asked, suddenly taking short skips through space with each step he took. "You look a bit sick." He put a hand of twitching black shadows up to her forehead and it dissolved into a jagged trap jaw of spikes and nails which encircled her head like a crown. She became afraid and started hyperventilating, which wasn't helping her nausea. His face broke through the moving darkness, scattering it into shivering human figures which dissolved into cosmic energy, his original hand back in its pocket. "**Perhaps you should sit down...**" Devi suddenly fell back softly and slowly through time and space while Nny sent his own chunk of the universe spiraling away behind him. That drove Devi over the edge and she blurted out a huge jagged cloud of white paint which stained the black cosmos around her. Her ass contacted seat and she politely placed her hands in her lap, sitting plainly on a bench seat as the shades formed.

Nny sat on a bench opposite where she faced, several seats down, and the universe reformed around them.

* * *

Express stop, no in-between travel. A bleach-white bullet train began its loud and hasty retreat into the tracked wilds surrounding its station. No buildings were anywhere. This was only a place to talk. The lights of the train created the tracks as it went and once the last of the wheels left the traction of the metal bars they ceased to exist, no longer needed by the train. No clouds formed in the sky but a perpetual army of shadows marched through the fields and under the trees to mimic an overcast of clouds. No sun was in the blue sky either, although it was as bright as noon all around. Inside the train, which was even whiter than its spotless exterior, chrome metal bars hung from overhead and metal poles jutted out from the middle of the floor, four per car. The seats were tightly cramped together although only two people rode the train and gave each other ample room...

Johnny had his arms stretched out on the shoulders of the air on either side with his right leg kicked up onto his left knee and his body leaned far back into the cushioned seat. He looked as relaxed as any man who held in either hand the still-beating hearts of his latest murder victims, a crooked grin on his lips and a wide-eyed furrow of his brow. Devi looked dead sitting. A splotch of white paint remained on her lips which her hand unconsciously wiped away, awaking her to the bizarre little world Nny had taken her to.

Now the train moved out, blaring out its hollow, ghostly horn and rocked through the fields bordered by coniferous trees, an evergreen eternity with a Swiss backdrop of snowy mountain peeks scraping the sky.

"How's life?" Nny asked, the light coming in through the windows of the train like the early morning sun tinted pure white.

"It's mad" Devi admitted "much like this place. Where am I?"

"Why ask" Nny asked "when you know you're not going to find out?"

"Oh, right" Devi said with disappointment. "I forgot...nothing you do seems to make much sense."

"To me it does" Nny said. "That's no excuse for what I've done to you, though. I mostly came here to apologize, although my own methods of doing so are as baseless as my own dreadful fall into insanity. Truly, I am sorry. I know I fucked you up a good bit, but I am here to make amends, like it or not."

"I don't have a choice, do I?" Devi asked.

"You always have a choice" Nny said. "Existence is too fragile for you not to have any choices. You can accept or not. Chances are you won't be seeing me anymore." Nny kicked his legs up and switched their positions, then put his fingers together in front of his face. "So, while I exist here, **say whatever you want.**"

"No" Devi said outright. "Nny, I don't think you deserve any closure on my part. You flipped-shit on me, and what's worse is that you were the only guy I was really attracted to...I really liked you Nny. I could have loved you, but you tried to kill me. Reddest flag I ever saw..."

"Hey" Nny said, throwing his arms out casually, "that's just me! My whole life has been an effort-driven dodge of humanity, including human contact. My idea of stealing a girl's heart is just that, carving it out and putting it on my mantel. No, now I understand love, and it is a selfish desire of people who wish to live past their life. I already surpassed that love and moved onto living on a higher plane...but enough about my boring life. I'm just glad you're doing alright."

"I haven't left my room" Devi said "in nearly three days. The only reason I would want to, besides to eat and crap, is so that I can take my pulse in the real world to see that I'm still alive!"

"But before that" Nny said "you were fine...if a bit bored." Devi suddenly shot to her feet in a rage.

"How do you know!?" Devi shouted. "Were you stalking me!?"

"Nope" Nny shamelessly said. "I simply know things now. Much more than before, given how little I actually _knew_ before."

"Then why bother me!?" Devi exclaimed. "If you **knew** so damn much how couldn't you **know** how much I didn't **want to see you!!!**" The train suddenly stopped. Gravity left reality for a bit while the kinetic energy surged through the train and passed harmlessly through Devi's ethereal body. Nny's hair was whipped to the side as a result of the shift from mach speed to 0 and he opened his black eyes in his friendly, defensive way to Devi.

"**Ah**" he began, **"but to want is human. You and I...we aren't human, are we?"**

That was it. Devi was dropped from a few inches above her floor back down, limp and lifeless, while the real Nny stood over her with a few sharp-edged tools in hand. He looked around the room, at all her works, and smiled.

"She certainly has been busy" he said. He was about to leave through the window to magically go back to the streets without a sound but something on the floor caught his eye. He bent down to pick it up and examined the picture closely, first with a look of unpredictable surprise and then and sneaky smirk. "Yeah...**Yeah, she's gotten real good. Hehehehe..."** He tossed the picture over his shoulder and jumped out the window, on to his next stop in reality. The picture displayed six cloaked figures of various stance and stature glaring down from the top of a hill where a throne floating on insect wings hovered in the sky. The figure they all glowered at wore **goat-hoof boots** of metallic silver and leathery black...


	60. The Power of Insanity

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

After a temporary temporal skip the universe began moving in a new direction, for the suburbs. Johnny marched with a sturdy, unbreakable gait keeping swift and light on his metal-toed boots. He spun a knife around in his hand, keeping a limp wrist and stiff fingers. His head was hung forward, leaning the rest of his skinny body even further into his march. He had somewhere to go, apparently, and wanted to be there already.

"I wonder" Nny began in a low, harsh growl "if an octopus is good at playing drums underwater..." Nny's bizarre train of thought derailed when he came upon a house that radiated with a thick miasma of intense evil. The heat of fire and the chill of death overcame him, the horrific nausea of some extremely deep pit or the vertigo of leaning out of a teetering open plane window. The same feeling he had walking around in the streets of Hell when he died, and it was that logic which made him cast an evil sneer in the darkness. Then the madness of his glee set in and he began chuckling, a frightening laugh that would petrify a vengeful ghost.

"**HEE-HEEEE! HEHEHEHEHE!!!!"** His cackle of dread echoed high up into the sky and far, far down into the cavernous hellish underground that snaked beneath Satan's house... Only one peculiar young man gave notice to this strange screeching, odd given that he was playing video games at a deafening level of volume and intensity. The speakers in his brother's room shook the floor and the walls with their decibel-belching capabilities.

"Cock-wranglers!" Pepito snarled as he leaned into and away from his motions on screen. He and his brother were on the same team, same objective but for some reason as they walked through the halls of the building their avatars fought in Pepito was the only one to die in the ambushes while Squee killed him for revenge or fled through some unknown passage to safety. Right after respawning near his brother they were both caught in another ambush which Squee managed to survive and fight back just after his brother had died. "Douche-waffles!!!"

"What?" Todd asked, remarking with laughter at his brother's bizarre remark.

"You don't wanna know" Pepito defended. He calmed down almost immediately and went back to playing again. His temper was getting much better, but it only held up when he had an unrestricted ability to swear as much as he could whenever he wanted. Thankfully, his mother was out at an emergency Church meeting and was unable to stop him, so he swore away with incredible disregard for proper grammar or syntax.

"We're not doing bad" Todd said "considering how bad the rest of our team sucks."

"Yeah" Pepito agreed, shooting a burst of fire down the halls, killing two players from behind. "We usually lose based on whole team-effort but we're always the top rankers in the game." A muted explosion flooded their senses. Both boys were dead, having walked right on top of a proximity mine. "Cunt-bucket Fuckers!" Pepito raged with a sharp jump to his feet. The game was over with no time for respawns. The points were totaled and, predictably, Pepito and Todd took the highest ranks of the match. Because of their teamwork and dubious point-stealing, however, their team had won out solely by their efforts.

'Cheap-asses!' one angered gamer exclaimed from their own team. 'Go fuck urselfs!' another raged, with gravely incorrect spelling. 'Nice job' one player from the opposite team congragulated, one with the third-highest score behind them. 'Kicked our asses nice and gud' another added.

"Figures" Pepito groaned. "We do all the work and our team mates hate us."

"But for raping the other team" Todd added with intrigue "they praise and thank us. It is quite the head-scratching oddity, isn't it?"

"It's bullshit" Pepito said. "Nothing to do about it but gripe and I refuse to stoop to their level. Let's quit tonight while we're ahead."

"Alright" Todd agreed. He got up and stretched, then began leaving for his own room.

"Woah, wait" Pepito began as he shut down the console, "you aren't leaving already, are you?"

"To go to bed?" Todd asked. "Dude, I know you don't care much, but tomorrow is a school day. Even if it's a broken system with no proper entrance, exit or even applicable middle-area where we learn anything productive, it's still something we have to do."

"Maybe" Pepito said in disagreement. "Well, whatever _hermano. _Just make sure you don't have one of your weird-ass dreams again. I don't like listening to you an Lena talking and talking and _taaaalkiiiing_ every fucking morning about psychology and 'reality'..."

"What's wrong" Todd asked "with talking to her?"

"Because she talks **back!**" Pepito said very bluntly. "How can you stand it!?"

"I guess" Todd said with a shrug "I have a high-tolerance for demonic babbling." Pepito turned and started growling in Spanish broken apart with some arcane demonic mumblings. Todd walked triumphantly back to his room, one door over, but was stopped prematurely by a horrifically twisted vision of human form, one bleeding darkness and protruding with spiraling, pitch-black horns from the shoulders and its hunched back. It's face was the most disturbing feature of all. It was twisted clear upside-down with he hair hanging down to the ground and a tiny fleshless face extending out from the dead mouth, acting as an actual face for the devil to speak from.

"_**Going to bed, are you Todd?**__" _the dreaded dark lord asked. Todd just nodded, unaffected by the hideous visage he saw. _**"Don't be afraid of nightmares, now. They aren't real...and neither are the creatures within them.**_"

"I know" Todd said. "Good night, sir."

"_**Buenos Noches, little one" **_Satan replied as Todd went into his room. Satan suddenly broke his disguise and let it disintegrate into a billowing plume of black fire. He stood among that plumage of destruction in his true form, eyes half open and heavy from the tired days of arduous work he had done. "Good night...what a useless prayer for him..."

* * *

Todd lay awake that night, tossing and turning under his sheets like some old, villainous friend had come to visit him, some uncomfortable paranoia that wanted to make itself known and be a pestilence to him. His instincts were all too right. He continued rolling in his covers until he had rolled so much with such frantic pace that he found himself trapped, unable to budge or struggle. He was caught in a burrito-torture hold of his own design. Still, the claustrophobia was less than what he felt in those cramped straightjackets in the asylums he drifted to and fro as a child. He sighed his fears away, only to awaken them across the room...

"What's the matter...Todd?" a whispering voice called. Todd's eyes shot wide open and he bit his upper lip, a tendency he thought lost to childhood. He jerked his body and thrust it up until he could visibly spot the source of the noise and peer at it through the darkness. He saw his closet door illuminated in strange strings of light from within, peering back at him with an arcane light of intensity. "Insomnia...creeping up on you...?" Todd began to shiver. It was a voice he knew, one he had forgotten and buried along with the troves of other terrible, intangible horrors from his boyish youth. Already he knew what was going to happen. All those memories he had held back started flooding in. All the pain and angst he felt so long ago...and the fear. **The fear!** It reemerged from its long winter sleep in its most suiting form, throwing open the doors that led into Todd's closet of hidden nightmares.

"**Want me to help you...?**" It was Shmee, the Terror-Teddy bear that had slept for so long in Todd's closet, in his mind. His incarnate madness was spawned once again, looking fresh and newly stitched up with a dirty shade of blue covering him. Todd's fear subsided, knowing the true form of all that sound and fury echoing and screaming from the chaotic shining darkness of his closet and became tense. He was meeting an old friend from long ago, one he did not like, and he expressed it clearly in his face. Shmee ignored his disdain and stepped out from the darkness, folding its stubby army stubs behind its plushy back. The doors slammed together and rattled up a racket of imperceptible darkness trying desperately to get out.

"Shmee!" Todd shouted in contempt. Shmee continued ignoring the boy's focused anger and walked across the floor to the bedside while Todd followed his every sly move. "How did you come to life?"

"Oh Todd" Shmee began, "you sound quite angry...**Hehehe...**maybe you need some medication. Remember? The pills? The Jell-O? **The coooookieeeees???**"

"Shut up!" Todd demanded. He somehow managed to break his comforter's hold on him and wrenched out one arm to point accusingly at the little plush bear. "You're the reason I had all those nightmares when I was in the hospitals! They didn't let me go home at all because of you, you damn Fear Sponge!"

"Oh?" Shmee breathed. "You think you can throw that term around after I told it to you **once?** What tenacity you've got..." Shmee raised up one of its mini-clawed arms and gave a snap of its tiny plastic claws it had grown. The snap resounded and stopped the sounds from within the closet. Now the shimmering lights of a faded, flowing kind of madness were all to be seen. Todd glanced at them, finding them to be addictive to watch, like a kaleidoscope of some kind. He quickly looked away, knowing all too well what kind of horrors would befall him if he stared a moment too long, and then turned his gaze back to Shmee who stood with the billowing curtains at his back. His tiny tuft of frizzy hair on top of his head blew limply in the wind, like a soggy blade of grass.

"Where did you learn to control your emotions?" Shmee asked, leaning in to his face. Todd clenched his teeth and swallowed his swelling guts to cool his building rage.

"Therapy" Todd said.

"Funny" Shmee said, cupping his ever-grinning chin with his little bear claws. "I don't remember any therapy, and why, we went everywhere together..." Shmee balled up his claws into a tiny little black fist. The closet door began shaking again, like a rough breeze was trying to force them open. Todd realized in an instant what was happening. Shmee was holding back an untold and unrecorded amount of pent-up hostility and madness at his own whim and had it ready to consume poor young Todd, who had never even kissed a girl (willingly) before. Todd was frightened, but didn't show it visibly. He knew what the bear wanted.

"I snuck out" Todd began "when I thought you were asleep for sleep-deprivation therapy. Then, when I got back, you were still sleeping, but when you were awake I just lied and said I had to go to the bathroom and my can in the corner wouldn't hold it." Shmee became immediately irked. His snarling sneer grew and the black-lid furrow of his eyes deepened. The closet had a much darker light coming from it now and more erratic streams of prismatic light. Todd felt his own head throb, wanting to turn and watch the lights until he drowned in them, but he refused and resisted, ever testing his own twisted conscience's patience.

"Oh, Todd" Shmee said, quite disappointed. "I am quite disappointed." Ironic repetition aside, the bear was becoming furious. It raised its stubby arm higher up this time, up to the top of its round, plushy head, and then threw it down with a loud crack of a snap. The doors began to crack and splinter out of the force on the other side. The madness was coming. Just one more snap and Todd would be consumed utterly. He looked back, eager to make his amends and stop the sickness from reaching him, but he suddenly didn't want to.

"I thought" Shmee continued, now looking progressively more evil "that we were friends, or at least associates in the same game of keeping you sane...Oh, how you have disappointed me..."

"I don't need you anymore" Todd said. "Why don't you find another messed-up little boy or girl and comfort him, make _him_ or _her_ your new crutch for attention!" The doors broke open. Shee's little playful claws turned into bloody, chipped, ravenous ripping blades the length of Todd's own arms. Eight big blades, four per hand, and one on each stub that acted as a thumb, jointed together with a nasty, rusted screw.

"Maybe I should do what the doctors wanted all along" Shmee began in a low "and stick a **probe in your brain!**"

"What?" Todd asked.

"Oh yes" Shmee said, nodding. He started floating up, his stitched on his legs coming apart rapidly as the tangible, black evil within formed a tentacled base for the teddy to float up on. "You wouldn't remember because whenever you held me, during all those meetings, _aaalllll_ those sessions, I took whatever memories you didn't want and held onto them, knowing that I could use them to my advantage, removing your knowledge of the world and obliterating your comfort. Your parents confirmed it ,they just wanted 'that little problem taken care of', and they were happy, Squee, **OH! They were HAPPY!!!**"

"I don't care" Todd said, panting and sweating as the warmth of his comforter made him flush with sweat. "About you or my fear or my childhood, there's nothing about my youth that I want to take with me as an adult, honestly...but there is someone...someone I learned from, who taught me to live for myself and not give a shit what anyone thinks of me, not to live up to anyone's expectations but my own. You, Shmee, just used me for food. This man...I can't confirm this for certain, but I'm pretty sure he **ate human misery and was never hungry at all...**"

"What are you babbling about?" Shmee asked. Suddenly, and with some strange yet great delay, Shmee finally noticed that the window was open and an ominous air blew through it. Todd was smiling in a haughty, sure-fire way. Shmee went from skeptical to startled to just plain afraid as he turned around and was swiftly **hacked and slashed into cotton-balled bits of fluff and stuff...** The broken bear fell to the ground, an abysmal little pile of rotten cotton and moldy cloth fur. Standing above all that chaos, twirling his triumphant blades while Todd fought the covers off of his body, was that man who ate the despicable shadows of human misery, looking around the room and trying to find Squee in it.

"I _have_ been gone a long time" Johnny said. He sheathed his blades as Todd fell to the floor below, ultimately losing the battle of the covers, and then shot back up to his feet. Johnny pocketed his hands in his coat and smiled, the wind from the open portal billowing the tails of his coat. "Hi-ya there, Squee. How've ya been?" Todd mustered up all the courage he could handle in order to speak whatever eloquent words he could to this master of the human sickness, an idol against human nature and an anti-idol to respectable human behaviour, a regular villain of emotions but a hero of insanity. From Todd's point of life, where insanity was normality in many homes he lived, this man was a super-human of a heroic class and to him he had only one excited, fearful, nostalgic word to say. Unfortunately, he couldn't say it and made a timid squeak instead.

"Squeeeee...eee?" Johnny looked down at the boy, raised an eyebrow, then placed a steady palm on his head. Todd grunted and awaited some kind of pain, but only saw Johnny standing as emotionless as a piece of art. Then hylarity ensued.

"**HEHUHAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAHAHAHEEEHEHEEEEE!!!!!!!" **Johnny reeled and leaned and squrmed and made all sorts of comical motions and gestures to that timid little sound while Todd just adjusted his head away while keeping the madman in the corner of his eye and kept his breath steady. Then, catching the infectious insanity, he began laughing as well. It was much more meek, especially compared to Nny's mad cackling, but it was complimentary laughter none the less. Still, he sounded quite unsure of himself, a nervous smile on his face.

"He...heheh....hahaha...?"

* * *

Johnny sat at the windowsill, spinning a blade in his fingers, while Todd kicked his feet to and fro on the edge of his bed where he was braced impatiently. He had a myriad of questions for Nny, none of which he really wanted answered, but was eager to initiate conversation with his long-lost neighbor. Finally, working up his courage, he spoke.

"How's life?" Todd asked.

"It goes" Nny answered "and goes and goes somewhere else. What life is, however, cannot be cleanly answered. I'm simply living, or not, though through my own definitions and perceptions of life I seem to be alive. Or am I simply experiencing a difficultly complex and realistic dream? Who knows. Either way, it's been going along at a rather steady pace. I'm enjoying it so far, that is to say, I never knew what a normal pace felt like until recently. How's your life?"

"About the same" Todd answered back out of courtesy. Though he struggled to follow along he did pick up the many existential notes of Johnny's speech and agreed with them on some note, however he was quite able to distinguish between his dream-scape and the nightmares of real life, unlike Johnny, it seemed. "What about sleep?"

"We get along" Johnny said. "What was that, anyway?"

"My bear" Todd said.

"Aw, I'm sorry" Johnny said in a quick blast of sympathy.

"No" Todd began, "I'm actually glad you killed him. He was trying to kill me, at least I think he was, or at least he was trying to force me back into his dependency as a mental parasite."

"Ah yes" Johnny agreed. "I had a few of those before. Consider yourself lucky. Only truly perceptive people can get to interact with demons and fairies on that level of perverseness."

"Fairies?" Todd curiously repeated.

"Demons get repetitive" Johnny said, looking at his reflection in the shiny metal of his blade. "I prefer to call them tons of different things so I don't get bored of them as fast. After all, they are everywhere. We are all haunted by some personal demon or scourge or living plague that gets on our nerves more than they try to kill us or oust us from society or...whatever yours was trying to do."

"Mine ate fear" Todd briefly explained.

"Ahhh" Johnny hummed in realization. He finally got his blade in his hand, a stabbing, ripping grip held high up on the handle with the blade pointed down, and sheathed it into an unseen handle within the sides of his coat. "Well, I'm sorry I killed your teddy bear, Squee. **I should have left that to you...**" Johnny went off on a low, knowing laugh, an inside joke from within himself spawning only from the knowledge of the demon he had killed.

"Well" Todd gratefully began, "I don't think I could have. I can't use a knife, I can barely cut bread, and sheer mental force of will was out of the question. I couldn't stand to look away from that light."

"Madness is seductive" Johnny said as he got up. "Even to me its curvy charms proved fatal..."

"Wow" Todd awed. Johnny's pace around Todd's bed seemed to last an eternity, so Todd got up and joined him, walking a safe three feet behind with his arms swinging freely.

"Yes" Johnny continued, preaching to the monotone sky, "all the darkest corners of our minds hold the same rot and contagion, the same carrion filth that leeches our strength and fuels our insanity. No human is truly so different that he doesn't know real madness. There just aren't that many innocent people in the world. Everyone experiences madness, whether they be fighting it off in the safe grip of lettuce-green scrubs in an all-white palace with no marble or whether they wait a minute too long in line for Burrito Place and go postal."

Johnny stopped in his march and Todd stopped as well, taking half a step before noticing and backing off. Johnny looked across a street into a lunch-rush Burrito Place where a twitchy man in a business suit waited behind a long line of college students chattering and frolicking around and senior citizens who would forget what to order at the moment their turn came.

Suddenly, as a bead of sweat dropped from his nose onto his watch, he snapped. Todd and Johnny watched all the synapses fire individually, leading up to the explosive melt down of screaming and babbling in hideous tongues. Todd hid behind his shadow and his evening shirt collar while Johnny just stood and smiled. The executive ordered his own legalized execution order and pulled out a letter opener and hardwood desk label with his name inscribed in copper from his briefcase.

"**THIS WATCH WAS NEEEEEEEWWWW!!!!**" he shouted with mad anger and contempt. He stabbed multiple rambunctious young men and women with the knife and bludgeoned the wrinkled old heads of the elderly in with the blunt cudgel he held. He became a villain of order but a hero of insanity, venting his arcane and uncontrollable rage through violence. It was not safe and it made no sense but he didn't care. He, in terms of his own perverse sense of self, was doing a good thing. The teenage girl hid behind and under the counter, shaking with fear, until the slaughter finally ended. Johnny and Todd appeared amidst the terrible carnage, standing atop the soggy corpses of a mountain of skinned teens and re-broken old men and women. The man, now sane again and covered head to foot in blood, sighed and approached the counter. He stood there, perfectly normal and even upbeat about his place in line, and began to order.

"Hi" he greeted casually, full of lively pep and happiness. "I'd like one Lunch Burrito with extra _carne_, _por favor!_" This was the kind of annoying family man who spoke in the accent-less broken language of whatever restaurant he happened to be in. The girl gave a creaky, twitchy smile and rapidly pressed the silent alarm button, praying the police would come. No one in the kitchen had seen the massacre, so she placed the order as normal and shakily asked for his money.

"That'll $4.97, sir." The man handed over a 5 with a smile, she worked the register, and change was made. A minute later, his order came out. "Thank you very much" she fearfully said.

"No, no" the man said, "thank _you!_" He went on his merry way, right out the door, but Johnny's eyes didn't follow. They stared into the darkness on the other side of his eye lids, watching his grin lengthen into a crooked, evil smirk. Todd went to the big windows that formed the walls and watched the man get gunned down in an arguably one-sided police stand off. Only one officer was injured via projectile burrito. He grasped his fat chest where it hit and fell to the ground, drooling from the delectable stink of the burrito that bled itself to death on the dirty street.

Insanity in action.

Quite frightening indeed...


	61. Hell, Fallen from Grace

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Johnny stood at Todd's night stand while the boy looked out his window. The fresh corpse of a man gone mad was in the middle of the street, a puddle of blood forming from his opened chest. It was a calm and objective looking man, still dressed up in his gray work suit. Todd felt like he knew why the body was there, in such a position, holding a ruined burrito, but he couldn't place his memory in the perfect spot.

"Hooo!" Johnny suddenly howled in a tired dragging voice. Todd whipped around, now completely forgetting the body in the street, and looked at Johnny. "Life's a lot like talking a walk. Once the world ends you can't walk any further, and then, you're dead...or are you?" Johnny picked up a small porcelain figure on the night stand, one of an overjoyed bunny holding a carrot molded as closely to a perfect sphere shape as possible. "Does life end when you stop walking or when there is nowhere for you to walk?"

"I don't know" Todd admitted. "I think life is more like trying to push a rock up a hill."

"Really?" Johnny asked, suddenly becoming extremely interested. He set the figure down and took two long steps around the bed to stand next to Todd, intently leaning in. "How so?"

"Because" Todd explained "it never gets any easier, it can only get harder and the hill isn't always as steep or as lenient. But, as you go on, you become stronger and wiser as to how to push the rock and it becomes less of a burden, but no matter what the burden is always there. You could have more people helping you push the rock or you could offer to push someone else's rock, but until the rock tumbles over you and crushes you you'll always be pushing it."

"Interesting" Johnny said, nodding as he gathered all the information. He straightened his back and tapped at his chin in deep poetic thought. Then, with his rebuttal formed, he began to debate. "But what about the top of the hill?"

"There is no top of the hill" Todd quickly answered. "There's just a hill. No one ever gets to the top. The top is just an idea to get you to push harder and faster, to get through life as fast as possible." Johnny looked down at him with total neutrality for a moment. Todd became uneasy at the silence between he and the murderous maniac in front of him. Then Johnny took a hand to Todd's head and pet him lightly.

"My" Johnny began in amused praise, "what a thoughtful bastard you've become. Have I honestly influenced you that much, bringing down your already tarnished innocence and eliminating your optimism?"

"I try not to get too optimistic" Todd admitted "so my expectations don't get dashed when life disappoints me...it's a defense mechanism."

"Blinking" Johnny began "is a defense mechanism. What you've grown is a cultured anti-virus to human depression and sadness. If only more people operated like you, Squee, we would have an intelligent society that worked like a finely tuned clock. No one would dream impossibly. No one would waste time on toxic ideals and other stupid things. Instead, all feet would be planted at the ground, ever wanting to strive as humans in an unforgiving world full of natural disasters and unavoidable conflict. Wars would last mere minutes between only two people until they could reach peace. Courts would convict with much more haste _and_ ration, everything would be better...maybe..."

"I guess" Todd began "it's hard to imagine a world like that if you can't see past all the problems in this one..."

"No" Johnny began apologetically. "I've grown an annoying penchant for saying 'maybe' when I talk about ideals and whatnot. They could work but there's always the uncertainty that I don't want to play against, you know? Who am I to tangle with cosmic chance and destiny?" There was a brief silence in the night. The clouds silently stopped in the sky, the universe waiting for its main gear to start moving again. Todd scratched at an itch on his head while the break in madness gave him the clarity to do so and continued to wait on the edge of his bed. Then, in an explosive start, Johnny began laughing.

"**HEE-HEHAHAHAAAA!!!!**" A mighty wind blew in from the window, one smelling of madness and ice cream (which is what madness smells like to some) that kicked Todd inside the shallows of his skull. "Who am I? Who the fuck else!? **Of course I can question the universe! I AM the GODDAMN UNIVERSE!!! HAAAAAAHHH!!!!!"**

"You are?" Todd asked, undaunted by his dangerous madness.

"Yeah..." Johnny growled, turning low with a sulk in his shoulders and a lean in his back. His glowing eyes and teeth made the utter blackness of his shadowy garb stand out even more. Flashing glares from the metal knives lining the inside of his coat blinded Todd, and in the instant he couldn't see he saw something horrific, the face of some **rotted, laughing clown as it reached from the shadows with claws for hands.** Johnny saw it too, stopping his previous mad gait a foot from Todd's face, which to him seemed all too close, and straightened back up. "Yes...I am."

"Oh..." Todd grunted, unsure of what else to say. "Well...that's neat."

"Yes" Johnny agreed, taking out a blade and watching the light unevenly, chaotically dance off of it. "Yes, it is..."

* * *

The night reached its undefinable apex, twelve on the dot, and the darkness outside started pouring in through the still open window. Johnny stood facing the wall, staring intently at it, trying to see through the blue wallpaper to another world where mad women danced themselves to death. Todd was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling with his arms strewn out widely. The vision that shook him and Johnny still plagued him, that evil clown, but it was mostly the fact that it shook **Johnny** that shook him. He kept so many questions swimming and swirling around his head that he couldn't bear to contain them all for very long.

"What was it like" Todd asked finally "when you died?"

"Boring as shit" Johnny said bluntly. "Heaven was the most boring place and Hell was annoying as...hell. That doesn't quite work right." Todd sat up at the edge of his bed.

"I guess I get why Hell was annoying to you" Todd said "but I think since you 'died' last time they changed it around." Johnny turned his head. "It used to be more like a random purgatory where souls wandered around aimlessly, reliving the trauma of their past life and dying every day, living an eternity of their regrets and sins. Now there's a lot more fire and screaming. I think Satan wanted people to have more direct punishment as opposed to the indirect punishment because it wasn't working right."

"Why wouldn't it?" Johnny asked. "It takes a strong man to resist getting whipped or stabbed for torture. It takes a weakling to break under his own weight. It was punishment for those who really needed the punishment, the stupid fools who made one too many mistakes in their life and ended up regretting more than they liked about living. The psychological torture is what made Hell at least bearable for me for the first few minutes. Those who don't deserve punishment or overcome it can be entertained."

"Satan didn't like that" Todd said.

"Stubborn bitch" Johnny lowed. "Just because he doesn't like it doesn't mean he can just change it."

"Is that why" Todd began out of pure speculation "you haven't changed anything yet?" Johnny fell silent and went back to staring at the wall. The shadows inside stared back at him, forming a skinny black figure with hair like a nest of dead spiders and a billowing, curly cape of darkness. He had no answer. His mind was blank, devoid of any speculative thought, utterly without any sort of theory or composition on the subject. He sighed and parted his own shadow with his terribly cold breath.

"I don't know" Johnny admitted. Todd looked worried, not for his life but for his friend's apparently beaten spirits. Johnny took a sharp breath in and tapped his fingers together at his chest, then he turned around with a spin of his heel. "Well, Squee, it's been something tonight but I feel that I must go now."

"Alright" Todd understood. "I'm sure there's a lot you still need to do. Will I get to see you again?"

"Hopefully not" Johnny said with a grin. "You're a good man, Squee. At least, from my perspective, you seem to be growing into one. Stay bright, even if your shining light reveals things you don't want to see, and love your own life no matter how bad it seems to be. There's nothing scarier or more horrible in the world than depression. It's an ugly, godless feeling where the world just doesn't matter and all you can ever see is black. Any time you stare at space, Squee, don't look at the black. Look at the stars instead. **That's where all the good men go...over the stars and into the light."** Todd took a moment to himself to understand Johnny's cryptic words. He felt that he understood just enough, which was more than he though he would catch from the maniac's mouth, and he nodded. Johnny went through the window and seemed to disappear, a nostalgic scene from Todd's dark, distant youth. Still, it comforted him enough to go back under his covers and close his eyes to sleep.

"Oh!" Johnny exclaimed, crawling back up to the window for his final parting words. "I almost forgot. **Goodnight Squee. **_**Sleeeep Tiiiiight....!**_" With that cooked, mangled grin and those glowing white orbs for eyes, Johnny slowly slid the window shut as he left once more, leaving Todd as fearful and sleepless as he had been when he heard those words as a child. Still, the nostalgia was comforting...but the creepiness was really fucking weird.

Johnny proceeded to march through the midnight darkness and silence with his metal boots clanking softly against the sidewalk. He stared down at the ground where he went, making sure it didn't fall out from beneath him because of his simple ignorance. Now that the question had been posed he couldn't stop searching for an answer. Was he really walking because he wanted to walk?

"Does existence occur" Johnny mused "just because I want it to?" He kept walking, ignoring the rest of reality, walking through a blurred run together of all sorts of colors and noises. The cracks of all the bricks and asphalt faults became one and the muted, drained grays and blacks of the deep, dark night all came together in a flat, stirring void of depressing tones. Nny saw himself walking infinitely along that crack and into that swirling vortex of monotone colors, hands in pockets and glare unwatching. Reality was subjective to him, he remembered well when that strange ability truly came to be.

Then he hit a street light. It fucking hurt. His hands shot up and curled as he fell back onto his ass, nearly breaking it. The pain shook him from his dementia and brought him back to the staggering distress of reality. He found himself in a cul-de-sac of defeated houses that looked like corpses of real estate. Overgrown and dead lawns, broken fences, some walls had been chipped away from the weather of the years. Johnny finally stood up, stumbled back into the street light which he grabbed onto, and took another good look around. The street end seemed familiar, like he had seen it so many times from another angle. Then he remembered why.

* * *

The old address of heaven, house number 777. That's all that was left of his front porch. His house, once the seal of all human madness and sadness, was naught but a shell of a broken, haunted villa. The couch and TV and kitchen plumbing remained. That was it. Everything else of even minimal value had been stolen but those few things. The entrance to the underbelly, the man-made hell where so many suffered for so little for so very, very long, was closed by rubble from the initial caving of the house. Nny's absence had killed the house, and now nothing remained. Johnny, stuck in a daze from the knock to his head, let go of the light and began walking towards his house, the **house of the eternally dead, 777.**

Johnny went through the threshold where the door used to be, placing his unsteady hand on the only standing chunk of wall where the plate of his ironic address hung. It promptly fell to the corroded earth which cracked at even the light impact of the hollow dry wall. Johnny groaned and dropped down onto the couch. He reached around for a remote, almost subconsciously, and found one to his own surprise. Still, he was recovering from a mighty thud to the head, so all his surprise could warrant was the raise of an eyebrow and the sticking out of his tongue as he turned the TV on.

"_On tonight's program"_ the TV announcer began "_we have such great programs as 'Ow! My Balls!', 'Police Chases gone Horribly, Horribly Wrong', 'Meet the Statistics' and of course, everyone's favorite, 'Classic Commercial Carnival!' First, a word from our sponsor..._" The program gave way to a still image of a chihuahua standing and staring at the viewer. For some odd reason, Nny found it hysterical and started cackling loudly. The TV plugged into a wall with no electricity kept playing for as long as Nny watched it, and he sat there until the sun came up.

"Nny!" the roach-girl exclaimed, snapping Nny out of his TV trance. He looked to the side, shutting the TV off by ignoring its existence, and blinked at her. In ignoring the pain he had forgotten about it and got back up onto his feet, taking one last look at the broken shell of a TV with the shattered screen and rusted antenna. "What are you doing?" Nny didn't know what to say because he didn't know. He had lapsed into some point of his past that he thought was lost and now that it was behind him the memories were eliminated again...

"Huh?" Nny grunted. "In any case...now that I'm here I guess I should check up on one last thing before I leave."

"Why leave?" she asked, twirling her cigarette stick in her fingers. "You seem comfortable enough here. You could just stay for a while, or never leave at all."

"Hehehe..." Nny laughed with a creepy airiness about his voice. "You don't know much about this place for something claiming to be my conscience." Nny walked through the ruin to the sealed opening to hell and looked at it. The door had been broken apart by the fallen rubble, as if the house had collapsed just to seal this one opening. She hovered up from behind, her rust-toned black hair in Victorian curls, and leaned to the side impatiently.

"You know" she began "that you can move all that."

"No I can't" Nny argued. "I'm too...noodly. That's solid wall and roof. And door, I think." Still, Nny stared intently at that pile, knowing what gaping strangeness was beneath it. He had built it, or at least occupied it, for so long years ago. He knew all its twists and turns, all the meanders and dark corridors where the bodies had been nailed and stretched and hung up to bleed and bleed. He knew all the drainage systems that flowed from the floors down to the wall that he was sure now didn't exist anymore. He knew everything down there, somehow, but he felt like he had forgotten. He wanted to see it again.

_I want...I need to remember._

Nny stomped on the floor and the rubble disappeared. His mental rage obliterated the matter, sending it far away from existence, revealing the cold, gaping maw of hell. The stagnant air came up, conquering the fresh outside air with its stink and dragging it down to kill it slowly. The wind blew Nny forward, grabbing onto his hair with its claws and forcing him forward.

"I wouldn't go down there" the girl said flatly. She knew he wasn't listening, and so did he. He didn't reply. He just stared down with his wide, glowing eyes as he carefully descended, step by step. The stink of ages surrounded him, trapping him, but still he moved unhindered as if floating through a dreamy plain beyond his reality.

He saw the hooks that hung the frames of pictures he never remembered painting, paintings that had long ago either rotted or had been stolen by the adventurous looters who dared to descend into this horrific hell. He passed through he halls all stained with ancient blood grown into the cracking surface of the stony structure in the shape of the humans who spilt it. He walked through room after room filled with skeletons pierced with swords or scythes or knives or some other random killing implement. One skeleton was impaled with a gravy ladle, a memory which Nny laughed at that he had not kept it longer. He passed through the room where he had dissected limb from torso of human bodies, transforming them into cadavers before moving on to the next living subject. Some bodies still had their hooks and some flesh clinging to the tools he used. Even bugs never dared to enter this place after he left.

Then, finally, he reached the room where all those pipes connected. Where bucket after bucket of paint had been wasted on an abstract art that had lost all of its meaning to its creator, a being with no soul and no purpose at all. Nny looked up, finally walking out of his dream and into the cruel light of the real world, and he saw that broken wall. He also saw the paintings from the first hall up on the walls, all nailed at their four corners, and a host of bodies misplaced and skeletal. Men, their remains at least, wearing hoodies and baggy pants, at least sixteen of them, all frozen in the motions of their death. So many chose the easy way out, others chose to help in a hard way. It was the long aged, well preserved aftermath of some horrid orgy of pain and death among these fanatics.

The light from the lamp in the ceiling reflected off all the paintings, casting a focus of all the points to the middle of a wide, open wooden floor. The crossing streams of dark light, to Nny, **looked like a throne.**

"I wouldn't" she said, still behind him and against the wall. She took a drag from her stick and puffed it out slowly. Johnny walked forward, dropping his fingers. Once he stepped into that twisted light he felt oddly warm. His body pulsed with a lost humanity. He felt depression, heavy and unrelenting. He felt madness, brutal and beating at his skull. He felt emotionless, a cold and emptiness that reflected from his pale eyes like two moons against a sky full of stars. Then he felt normal. He returned to himself and looked down. There really was a chair there. Not quite a throne, just a broken electric chair without a crown or arm straps. Just a chair to him. He touched it, trying to remember it, but felt nothing through his gloves. He sighed. Obviously whatever he wanted to happen didn't.

Still, walking so far into hell tired him out, so he turned with a whip of his trench coat and sat down deep into the chair, letting his arms keep him up. The paintings billowed a little, just around their frayed edges where the huge nails driven into the wall didn't keep steady. Nny glared through white eyes and parted the shadows to create a straight path for the roach-girl to walk if she pleased. The dark lights spread out along the walls and transformed them into the fleshy canvas all slathered with beautiful paint to create horrific images.

The King of Killers sat at his throne, one leg crossed upon the other, and leaned into his fist out of boredom.

"Bring me a sinner" Johnny commanded "so they may judge themselves and so that they may die."

"Are you asking me?" she said.

"No" Johnny admitted, kicking both his legs up and slouching between both armrests. "I'm just talking out of my ass right now. It sure is pretty behind here, though. I don't see why anyone would want out so bad...I guess after a while it'd get boring."

"At least you're not trapped" she said. "You may try to kill me if we were enclosed for so long in a space like that."

"I don't doubt it" Nny said. "I'll get going in just a second...I want to savor this feeling of lonliness so I can have at least one happy memory of this place..." Johnny rested there for well over five minutes, unmoving. The only motion came from the light the billowing portraits cast and the trail of smoke from the static cigarette in the hand of Johnny's concerned conscience. Then, having grown bored of the place at last, Johnny took his only gun from his pocket and aimed it between his eyes. "I'm done!" he said and blasted off through the cosmos. Upon his departure the room returned to normal with **the wall still there as if it had never fallen.** Johnny walked through the cosmos with his hands in his pockets and a wide smile across his evil face...


	62. Suffering, Lament and Pain

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Jack and Maggy had a simple little life. They had always wanted a house in the suburbs, so they bought one. They always wanted a steady, secure source of income, so Jack got it. Maggy always wanted to be a mother so she had twins. Now those twins drifted apart from each other and became two distinct identities. Jack's job had worn on his through the ages and now he was emotionally numb. Maggy, meanwhile, had everything she wanted. Everyday made her want to dance and sing. She was always a mother, some say since the day she was born. She never frowned doing the dishes or cooking a meal or taking care of whining children. She reveled in that want, the fact that people truly depended on her.

That was her biggest flaw. With no one to live for or live through she would break down. Every day she was alone she did a day's worth of work in mere hours, leaving herself with alone time. She always used that time sitting across from a dark television, watching her reflection intently to mark any potential flaws, and waited for someone to need her. She had memorized the best of her features, the curves and indentations when everything was supposedly perfect. Her thin face and wide, happy eyes only rounded out the rest of her aged features. Though she had gone through two simultaneous births, she hadn't lost any of her girlish figure at all. She was just as attractive as any woman half her age, not that she was that old to begin with.

She always wore her hair a certain way, a retro-new-agey coif with inward-curled sides and a top that spiraled forward. No matter how much she looked at her hair in the TV the blonde didn't seem to show very well. Only when it was particularly sunny out did she see her true hair and eye color. Never had she seen this in her daughters, both of whom took after their father and in some rare instances in their life were referred to as little boys. She never regretted that. It was just another battle of tears for her to comfort as a goddess of the home. Maggy always loved to mother people. It's what she was ultimately made to do, not as a woman but as Maggy. And she was happy.

She felt that way.

One day, just an inconsequential day among a longer, wider breadth of days, Jack returned home in less of a slump than usual. He seemed happy, wearing a grin and marching with a hot skip in his step. His daughters looked at him strangely from their living room where they watched television and did their homework from their arduous day of school. They'd never recalled seeing him so happy before. Jack disrobed his coat properly in its closet, threw his briefcase into his study on his way past and went straight into Maggy's realm, the kitchen. In a particularly playful mood, Jack reached over and covered her eyes.

"Good afternoon" Jack greeted. Maggy giggled and pushed his hands away. He took her hands, spun her around and gave her a deep kiss. When they parted and he spun her around once more she went limp and breathless, leaning against the sink counter with one hand and pressing the other limlpy against her forehead as he eyelashes batted madly with an intoxicated rush of amour.

"Dear!" she gasped. "That was magical! You stole my breath, I nearly fell!"

"I'm glad that excited you" Jack said as he loosened his tie. "I have some great news. I went to the doctor after work today."

"Oh!" Maggy exclaimed. She knew that this was one of his work-appointed check ups where they would check for everything and make sure nothing would prevent him from working at anything other than peak efficiency. "What did they say?"

"They found the source of my depression" Jack admitted with a short, happy chuckle. He brought her closer to whisper it in her ear, knowing how much his daughters enjoyed eavesdropping, the little voyeurs. "It turns out, for the last ten years, I've had erectile dysfunction from the stress of constantly working and paying off my student debt." Maggy blushed, then fell gravely sullen.

"Oh my" she whispered back. "That seems like something we could have worked out if you'd talked about it before..."

"Not quite" Jack replied. "The doctor said that, while therapy would have been possible, it would have been extremely invasive and expensive. They gave me some pills...and suggested that I work on testing the solution as soon as possible." He turned to his wife and raised his thin eyebrows at her, deepening the implications of intercourse with a 'required' tone. Maggy gave it a moment of thought. On one hand, nothing quite beat sex to her recollection in the early years of her marriage. However, there were still dishes stacked up in the sink she could tend to.

"Alright" she agreed. "For you." Jack swept her off her feet and led her upstairs in his amorous cradle. Their daughters peeked around the corner, letting their shoulder-length hair drop down and inter-tangle with glaring, seeking eyes. The bedroom door was shut and locked. The girls knew the drill. They raced up and put their ears to the door and their hands to their...regions.

"You think they'll really do it?" Abigail, a conservative and regular-dressed girl, asked her punk-rock sister, Paige.

"Of course they will" Paige answered, pressing herself into the door, hoping to hear a little better. What voyeurs they were...

"Alright" Jack began. "I found this out at the doctors...in order to be stimulated...for an erection. I need to take two pills" which he did, swiftly, tilting his head up so they slid straight down his throat.

"Then what?" Maggy asked as she slowly disrobed. He grabbed her by the arm and threw her onto the bed, a romantic gesture twisted into something evil when she saw his face. "Jack..?" she timidly asked. He was squeezing her wrist tight. It seemed he was determined not to let her escape.

"Now" he said as he took her hand to his throat, "**I want you to choke me!**"

"What!?" Maggy protested.

"Listen" Jack demanded. "When I was there, getting examined, I accidentally inhaled a cotton ball and nearly suffocated. When they looked over me they saw that I had an erection and they naturally deduced that I was psychologically geared towards erotic asphyxiation. I get stimulated when I stop breathing!"

"Can't you just hold in your breath?" Maggy asked, hoping to find some kind of middle ground that didn't involve potential murder. Jack forced her fingers to press and he groaned in pleasure as he felt his airway thin. Maggy looked down and saw his pants tighten almost instantly. For the sake of her husband, she thought, she would endure the pain both ways. Jack and Maggy made love for the first time since she delivered her daughters while those two naughty eavesdroppers collapsed outside the door against each other.

And she felt it. She felt it all...

* * *

A week had passed since Maggy and Jack reconciled their sexual relations. They had reconciled over and over each day that week, each time Maggy became less and less comfortable with injuring her husband. The last time she did it he demanded that she cover his face with a plastic bag. She had tremors thinking about it, the pleasure she experienced nearly wrecking her mind along with her bed. She couldn't complain without going on and on about the absolutely wonderful stimulation she felt, but still, the thoughts lingered on of her eventually killing Jack in a sensual fury.

She nervously chopped vegetables now, alone in her kitchen. It was the first time she had truly felt alone in her work, for this time she had nothing to confirm her purpose. There were few dishes as the girls ate privately, staying enclosed in one or another room together to 'work', those little deviants. Her husband would hurry home to masturbate, simply ecstatic over the chance to do so after over a decade, and then he would wait for his wife at night with an uncanny level of excitement. Maggy had stopped eating regularly lately. The worry and concern plagued her mind and drew her attention away from the more important areas of her body.

She had become a bit thinner, which any other woman would have become envious of, but it only meant she had new lines and contours on her face to obsessively memorize. She had taken to gardening more and more over the week as an excuse to avoid that cursed mirror in the TV room, but at some point she always found herself staring at her own face through some god-planted device. She always saw in the reflection not a doting, caring wife but a heathen, a murderer caught in the act. The guilt of harming her most beloved one ate at her like a parasite, always growing stronger and burrowing deeper, and all the time she knew that she could not fight it.

Despair. She felt it.

On Friday, the last day of the week and the last day of the month, Jack came home in some kind of indescribable rage. He had an angry hop in his step. He glided across the floor on pure rage that he tried to hold deep down in his chest, but somehow he couldn't help it. The beast of his rage was rattling its cages, making him pant and sweat and stomp into the kitchen where he took his wife in his arms and began slobbering inaccurately at her face. She knew what would come and couldn't help but feel a dreadful anticipation.

"We need to go" he said in a strained voice. "Right now!"

"But" she attempted, "the dishes..."

"Girls!" Jack shouted. "Do the dishes!!!" He had no reply and he didn't care. He needed to take her right now, no distractions, and sustain his limited sexual sanity. He was a 'bursting point'. His logic left him. His id was purely in charge of his body now. Maggy was lucky, technically. Had he seen one of his daughters first then some infinitely more disgusting act would have unfolded. He was a monster bent on fucking, and fuck he would. He hurried Maggy along, clutching her wrist as if to choke it to foreshadow the evening's events, and rushed her up the stairs and into the bedroom. Once the door was slammed the daughters came out from Paige's room and rushed over to the door.

"Are they gonna do it?" Abigail asked.

"Duh!" Paige said. She took a gulp from a bottle of water to replace what sweat she had lost doing lewd things and pressed up against the door.

"I've got this" Abigail said, revealing a bendable telescopic lens.

"I get off on sound" Paige said. "You can watch if you want." Abigail laid down on the floor and poked her little device under the door, just in time to watch her ravenous father tear apart her mother's dress while she kicked in protest and began the act. Her legs straightened out, shivered, and then fell limp again. Abigail couldn't hear, but based on her sister's nearby moans and quivers something loud had obviously been shouted. The entire family worked to their own separate but similar lewd, disgusting ends, all inadvertently participating in each others acts. The night ended with the same mixtures of satisfaction, both just and tainted with all kinds of wrong, and the cruel gripping guilt that forced Maggy to lay awake and stare at her ceiling.

Even here the grace of God escaped her. In the heated reflection above she saw herself, a felon living in total sin, a terrible wife and mother who only stared with wide eyes, trying to justify her own perverted feelings of joy and success. Jack lay beside her, the belt still loose around his neck, and a tired, childish look on his face. She couldn't move to see him directly but that's what she saw, a simple an innocent expression on a man who had just early exploded with violence and need which he directed straight to his loving wife. She felt scared. Fear for both of their lives.

She felt that...it was heavier than before. She remembered fear from other times, other battles, but none like this, none this weak but piercing.

* * *

Saturday finally came. Maggy could barely stand. The night had gone on longer and more forcibly than she had initially thought possible. Her daughters refused to leave their respective rooms for reasons she naïvely assumed were flu-related. Jack forced himself down to bed for the day, apologizing as a sight-based reflex to his wife's face for his behavior the previous day.

"I'm so sorry" he would say. "It was uncouth of me, I know, but the pills had some adverse side-effects if I took too many of them...the doctors didn't exactly clear that with me at first, but now I know. I won't take any more of the pills..."

"It's alright dear" Maggy said complacently. "I was quite excited too, you know. Just promise me you'll take it easy on yourself for today. I'll bring you up lunch in a little while."

"What happened to breakfast?" he weakly asked.

"You slept through breakfast, dear" Maggy said. "If it makes you feel better, that's what we can have for lunch."

"Thank you" Jack said "and, again, I'm very sorry."

"It's alright" Maggy said with a happy smile. I just hope you recover well." She left the bedroom, unaware of the belt her husband still kept around his neck. Her daughters stirred slightly, Paige emerging visibly from her room with a tired look and her dark brown hair hanging over her face like cobwebs. "Good morning" Maggy greeted. "You sure are up late. Are you sick?"

"No" Paige groaned. "I'm gonna take a shower, though..."

"That seems like a good idea" Maggy agreed. "You look like you could use a shower, actually."

"I know" Paige admitted, hinting some comical inside information. She sulked over to the bathroom and took a towel from the linen closet. She had a devious grin of knowing as she left her mother's sight. Maggy descended the stairs once more to start her preparations for lunch, all the while avoiding mirrors and similar reflective surfaces, afraid to look at her own face. She kept thinking and thinking all the time about the inevitable fall to madness either she or her husband would take. Most likely it would be he, and then she would follow soon after.

The descent, she thought, would be steep and unseen, a shocking event that would come from nowhere. She felt the inevitability creeping up her back, clawing its way to her throat to choke her. All she could think about was the choking, always the choking. She had associated the choking with her sexual nature, feeling a huge lump that restricted her breathing form each time she thought even remotely sexual thoughts. Unfortunately, as she scrubbed her dishes, those thoughts poured in from all sides, all the time. She clutched her throat to force that bloody pulp back down but failed and only restricted herself further. The poor girl.

She felt all of it too.

Eventually the panic collapsed her and she passed out. Hours passed. Her internal clock woke her up right around dinner time. Her own growling stomach only reminded her of all her broken promises, the lunch she skipped and the dinner that had so far gone neglected. Thinking of all the others in her house before herself she made a rush to prepare something delicious and portable, resorting to some home-made taquitoes filled with either chicken or beef and served with salsa on the side. She took a plate of ten up to her husband, who she knew would be hungry, while the rest of the twenty-odd rolled foods sat on the counter, waiting for her daughters and her own mouth to consume.

"I'm so sorry, dear!" Maggy called. "I slept through dinner. In truth, I fainted, but I'm fine. Here, I've brought you a late supper!" She opened the door with a quick twist of the nob and a nudge of her shoulder to see her husband sitting up in a bed of messy, tossed-about covers. He was grinning madly with a belt around his neck and blue on his cheeks. She dropped the plate and rushed over to help him. "Oh no, dear! I thought you would take it easy! Dear, hold still while I take this off!"

"She didn't like it" Jack said madly. "She's not like you...no. You're passive, you never really minded, right? You just did it and grinned **right?**"

"What?" Maggy asked. She looked over and saw another body, a female body, **a naked body** laying in her place in bed. She felt overwhelming sadness, betrayal, pain that she'd never felt before that nearly killed her. She circled the bed slowly, keeping her gaze fixed on that body, thinking gruesomely visual thoughts of berserk fury where she would please her husband to death. She reached the other edge of the bed, stained with blood and unmentionable other liquids and bent down.

"...Abigail...?" she cooed, trying to stir her lovely daughter from her fear-frozen expression. She shook her once, then turned her over and reviewed the deep marks on her delicate little neck. A mother is always prepared, even for death. Was Maggy really a mother if death had struck her with such shocking surprise that she screamed herself hoarse?

"She wasn't good" Jack said with a demonic grin "at holding her breath." He stood up, dragging the lighter covers along with him as a swaying toga that he eventually pulled up with his arms. "She didn't take after you enough. I didn't want to go easy on her, like how you like it...but she couldn't take it..." Maggy was holding back her rage in the form of vomit, deeming it something sacrilegious to throw up on the fresh corpse of her own daughter. Jack put his warm hands to her shoulders an slowly began inching them closer to her throat. "You're still the best...the ire of my eye, Maggy. I love you...forever..." She backhanded him to the ground and lost herself. Visions of blood and shaking heads lacking skin flashed like bolts of lighting between black backdrops soaked with white blood.

She never found herself again. The scene was stumbled upon first by the lust-drunk Paige who saw the slaughter in its fullest. She had stolen the remainder of the taquitoes downstairs before coming back up to find her parents, and unfortunately, she found them. Her father on the floor, his throat broken and collapsed, pooling blood around his mad grinning and wide-eyed head. Her sister, sullied by incest and spread out as a pale sheet. Her mother, bless her torn heart, hung from the ceiling with a sturdy, long belt, dangling helplessly with some pleasurable juice dripping down her leg. Paige's eyes went wide with wonder, her nostrils flared with the stench of death, and only one thought crossed her perverted mind.

"What kind of party did I **miss!?**"

And such was the end of their lives. And she felt it.

* * *

In some arcane reaches of the world, deep in her brain that had been probed by so many demonic instruments, **Yvonne felt it all. All the suffering and pain, emotional and physical and all the realms in between, she had experienced it all. **She felt it as she had felt the world's pain from so many other places at once, and she fell into despair. She regretted her loss, her life, her love of lust, and she repented. In the next instant she forgot and fell back into the fearful anticipation of the torture to come...her prayers were erased and ignored.

Yvonne endured her torture with fear...


	63. Lament, Pain and Lament

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

It was a cold December that year. 1930, a year of great struggle. The Prohibition act continued in full swing, a terrible, tyrannical implementation that set society back by leagues and bounds. The people were on edge and tense, the 'Nobel Experiment' was failing as the mobs and criminal organizations continued the illicit distribution of alcohol across the country. It was also a tense time where war was nearing an explosive international level, a great divide splitting the western world among itself. An upstart politician in Germany known as 'Adolph Hitler' was making a stir of things by attempting coup after coup on Germany's barely rebuilt government. After the Great War ending in 1918 the United States had its own doubts about their successive rise to military power.

One group of dare-devil outlaws thought otherwise. They were smarter, militarily anyway, than the politicians who tried to sick the police dogs on them every turn of the lunar month. It was like demented clockwork where they would pick their guns up and run away through the biting winds or blazing sun, outrunning the cops with their fancy little guns and billy clubs. A revolution ahead of their time, soldier and warriors of their own modern era who fought for what they wanted to believe in but were oppressed for doing so. They waved glorious American flags everywhere they went, carrying them into battle and waving them through the gun fire they engaged in, attesting themselves as Americans fighting for their rights. Americans, fighting for their freedom!

"Pardon me" a young boy in suspenders and a flimsy brown felt hat began "but ain't this getting a bit bully here?"

"Whaddya mean?" a gruff, tall man polishing his own hunting rifle asked. "We gotta move if we wanna outrun the cops, kid. That's how business works around here."

"I know that" the kid said "but its colder than a dead chick's cat trap today. We couldn't get a good hideout with a fireplace or a burning barrel or nothing?"

"Deal with it" a low voiced, somber old gentleman said, a man who had seen wars greater than the one he fought now. "We're in our own war, you know. This ain't no party here. We're scrapping like boxers on benders, here kid. Keep up with the times before they're over." The kid glanced at him, away from his gun that was still spotted with the dents of offensive gunfire from the previous fight, and stared through the old man. His mind drifted to the future, a world of peace that he wished for, and nostalgically he resumed his gun maintenance with a micro-sized smile.

That hope in his heart for the change in the world...he felt it.

Still the cold winter dragged on. The boys in their bandit arms picked up and carried their way further south from the harsher climes of the wide plains they strode through. No whiskey in these parts, so far west of Appalachia. Even the corn booze that would have been stored up throughout the fall seasons was dry or shipped already. Nothing to sustain the vigor and verve of the freedom-fighting troupe as they stormed their way south. South was the ticket to their freedom, an ironic flip of a previous historical situation, for in the south even when the weather was cold it wasn't as cold as the north. There was snow, but it wasn't frequent and deadly. There was beer there too, non-trafficked beer, much more than up north.

In one overnight stay at a hospitable little town near the border of old southern West Virginia. Tomorrow they would trek and track their way to a hidden-away truck which would take them through to Georgia where their blissful quest-end waited them in the form of shining, liquid impurity known as 'Moonshine'. That overnight stay erupted into violence quickly. The sheriff from the county had been informed through the trafficking of information that these curious men toting guns under their clothes were in fact Prohibition antagonists looking to break the law. That was all that was needed for that sheriff to round up a band of minute-men ready to fight justice for a swig of confiscated liquor.

"Alright now!" the sheriff called through an amplifying analogue bullhorn. "We know you're in there! Come out and don't resist arrest and we won't shoot at'cha." He plugged the mouth of the horn and turned aside to his hidden militia. "Shoot 'em if ya want. Just don't injure no civilians, alright?"

"Got it" the twisted mercenary drunkards agreed, hiding in the ambient night shadows. The ruckus had indeed awoken and stirred the revolutionists from their beds but the plea for merciful justice had gone unheard. They knew what was coming at them. Ten men all ran to the roof of the motel they quartered in and took stealthy cover among the unused boxes and barrels that created an uneven skyline from the ground.

"Now what?" the young man asked his older superior comrades.

"We wait" another said, checking his polished matte-black Tommy gun. He unclipped the round chamber full of bullets, counted them with a glance and clipped it back, sliding the loading notch all the way back and pressing the extended butt he attached between his arm and chest.

"Whatever we do" the oldest veteran said "we have to make sure we can get away with a clean escape. None of these ass-moles are gonna want to keep up with us if we play it right."

"Ass-moles?" the young man asked, smirking at the esoteric jargon. "What's that mean?"

"As in a mole located upon a donkey or 'ass'" the old man translated. "These little puke-wipes aren't worth the mention of whereon that mule they'd be located, though."

"Right next to the balls" a larger, and wider, man said with a stupid grin. "That's where these guys'd be, next to the balls! Hehehe..."

"Cram it, slackjaw" a slick New Yorker sporting a befitting fedora said. "Look at this mook, you can't even tie your shoes right can ya?" He turned his thin neck and sharply featured face to the old man, the de facto leader, and grimaced at his old age. "You sure you can point that thing straight, gramps?"

"I could" the old man began, looking over his hunting rifle "when I was capping the Krauts over in Germany. Iron Cross pansies tried to run and hide in their bunkers, bam! They died running. Ran clear forty feet with no head before falling. If these guys look German I'll kill 'em no problem."

"Whatevah" the slick city shooter said. He beckoned the kid over with a wave to hide with him behind his thick crate. The kid charged over in a tactical run and held his pistol tight in his grip. "Listen kid, once they come up here you lean out to the right and I'll go out the left and we'll fire up at them instead of exposing ourselves and given them a chance to get in our heads."

"Alright" the kid agreed. He pressed his back to the box and, after a brief moment, started laughing. "Get in our heads. That's a good one."

"Yeah" the city man agreed. "I thought so too." That sense of unwavering camaraderie. That inspiration...

He felt it.

* * *

After the gunfight, which the revels had won, they fled the town in the dark cover of the night and reached the shabby shed where their truck waited. The kid, still young with a body count just now peaking an amateur soldier's in the middle of a war, took up the polished Tommy gun of his first fallen comrade. He had left them behind and was submitted to the countless gunshots while he set off a literal powder keg of trouble. A massive explosion and the chunky rain of policeman bits was the last gift he gave his comrades to give them that final push forward.

Now, still traveling through the darkness of the winter night, the men in the back of the sheltered truck slept in heavy canvas blankets while an insomniac of questionable metal stability drove with a calm smile and a bare elbow out the window, chapping the skin off in the razor-sharp cold wind. The kid kept sleeping, riding the bumps in the road as eaves in his dreams until the truck came to a slow and controlled stop. Then he awoke and looked around in the darkness. Two men silently removed themselves from the fold, a tan confirmed Hispanic worker and the wide and jolly dimwit, and slowly departed outside into the calm, slow snowfall.

"Hey" the kid whispered once they were gone, nudging his city-slicker ally with his elbow. "Hey" he whispered again. The city man stirred and awoke with a snort, then fell straight back to sleep. "Don't do that, hey!" the kid whispered with more urgency, this time pushing him.

"Wha...?" the man groaned. "Who? We here already?"

"I think something's up" the kid said. The man had to blink and assess the actual situation at hand.

"We ain't here?" he asked. The kid took the proactive. He grabbed his shoulder and rushed him out, keeping his gun just in case. He followed the foot prints in the shallow snow on the side of the asphalt highway they traveled down to the front of the car where the out-of-mind driver was lighting up a cigarette while the other two stood in front of him with their guns out.

"Ahhhh" the driver sighed, taking the stick into his clenched, stubbled jaw. "That's some good tobacco, gentlemen. -Ba-Koh. Toooh.......Bacco."

"Cut the shit, alright" the dimwit said in a very stern and demanding New York accent. "We want the share."

"Calm down" the driver said, waving his glowing stick around in the air, drawing patronizing circles that the large man's eyes followed obediently. "You're gonna give yourself a coronary, you know a heart attack one of those...nasty little deals there. Just calm down. Your share ain't here yet, and it sure ain't that big with all those leeches riding cargo."

"What?" the Hispanic man asked. The kid and his ally stayed hidden behind the rear of the truck, making sure they weren't seen by the obviously duplicitous eyes. "I thought you said we'd split it all! Even-evens, man! What about that?"

"Calm down, _Pedro_" the driver said. "You're getting a bit ahead of your sombrero right now, aren't you? Heh-heh-heh..." Something about his laugh, all throaty and gravely from smoking, made the kid disgusted. It sounded intentionally scheming and, almost too obviously, evil.

"Hey" the former dimwit began with a thick pointing finger, "don't make fun of him just because he's Mexican, alright?"

"My name really is Pedro, though" Pedro said, feigning neutrality to the issue.

"What do we gotta do here" the big man began again "to get you off your scheming ass?" The driver clenched his cigarette in his lips and looked across the road with a sigh. He took in another drag before taking the stick from his mouth and blew a few smoke ring.

"For starters" he began, pointing with wagging fingers clutching the cigarette, "I want you to kill...those two."

"Shit" the city man said.

"Like hell they will" the kid said. He took off running, dragging his friend along with him as they retreated to the other side of the car. The men with guns promptly followed around both sides of the car to pin them. Pedro circled around the back, armed with a simple pistol, but was taken out in a surprise attack by none other than the veteran soldier wielding his rifle.

"Turncoats will be dealt with on the spot" he said to the corpse. A rapid burst of automatic fire exchanged with yet more fire rang out in the wide open road. The driver grinned with his terrible smile, his sleeveless arms chapped and blue from the sharp, cold air. The kid had defeated the large dimwit with his surprise attack just as the dimwit led off a retaliation in his death throes that met no mark.

"You alright?" the city man asked, grabbing hold of the kid's shoulders. He looked him over, welling with excitement, and began laughing loudly. "You did it! You son of a bitch mook, I love ya!" Final words always have a heavier sting. When the words 'I love you' are given between a man and a woman, the impact is already great. If either one dies just after their utterance of confession goes out, the excitement and anticipation for things to come turns into incredible grief. When a man says that to another man it most often conveys a sense of brotherhood and family, a rare occurrence of a man opening himself to another in as understanding a manner as possible.

He felt all that, and then the grief as the smiling head began to soak up the blood from its new, steamy hole. The kid was alone, facing a maniac with a gun on the roof of the car dangling a gun just over his head.

"He doesn't look all that great, kid" the driver said. He flipped down onto the ground, planting his feet nicely, and turned to face the kid with a cocky sneer. "You know you remind me of someone...the way you're just standing there, accepting your fate. You remind me of a fish."

"...a fish?" the kid replied, still chocked up and staring into a void.

"A fish" the man began, "no matter how much it seems to struggle, always knows its fate. It can't breathe. There's something caught in its mouth that's making it bleed. Some giant fucker is about to take a knife to its back or stomach and gut it. Your mouth's still wide open." He closed his mouth then. "You haven't blunk in a while." SO he blinked and started breathing heavily. "Oh, there you're breathing!"

"**AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!**" All of his rage and anguish exploded in a punch that carried itself through one side of the man's mouth and out the other. The power sent him off the ground and bouncing into the ditch on the side of the road where he rolled up the other way and then back down to barely breathe in the muck that had gathered. The kid stood breathing heavily, his fist clutched so hard that it hurt, and his eyes leaking tears.

Betrayal.

"You bastard" he lowed. "I thought we were in this together..." A gun cocked next to his head. His eyes widened in fear but did not follow to see the threat to his life. Instead, once the fear subsided, he shut his eyes tight and grit his teeth as the stern old veteran and the misunderstanding rebels filed out to the sounds of gunfire to see justice be performed.

"We are" the veteran said. "He wasn't. Neither were any of them...but you've still got a shot, kid." The kid opened one eye and looked at the soldier with worry. He spun his pistol, a Luger from the war, and stopped it to clutch the barrel and hand the clip over to his young protege. "We've got a few more miles to drive. Someone's bound to call the cops. What say we get to it?" The kid, taking no second to think, took the gun, nodded, and sheathed it in his belt.

"Buckle up" the kid said as he made a hopping dash for the cab of the truck. The men filed into the back with their guns loaded and ready while the kid worked the gears of the car and began driving down the road again. He adjusted the mirrors away from the bloody carnage and left it all behind him. That stoic isolation, that lonely stinging pain of being without any proper family, any proper place.

He knew it...

* * *

Finally, the promised land of Georgia. So much promise for the little rebellion squadron, so little time to effectively make their rounds. The first step was procuring whatever amount of illegals they could get to fit in the truck without arousing suspicion. The next step was looking for replacement soldiers. Five were already gone and that left only five to continue with carrying out their extensive mission. To that end the troupe went down to the local speakeasy where they shared illicit drinks and searched for candidates without any duplicitous hang ups. Loyal men who wouldn't dare turn their own comrades in for a slim increase in personal profit.

It wasn't easy, but five were found. Only five. Now with a force of ten men wielding guns again the group made their final preparations to move out. Down in the club where the music played and the women passed themselves around as much as the drinks that were served and the poker games were always hot the five white boys, four black boys and one grumpy old Indian man got up to move out. Suddenly the bouncer at the door came running in with his dark hands waving in a panic.

"RAID!" He shouted. For his defiance in the face of the law that came bearing down on his back he was shot through the face. The first test of the new force. The kid flipped over a table and armed himslf readily. The others of his group did the same, seven tables to hide ten people. A stand off ensued between them, the cops and other military forces that accompanied them, and the vigilantes on the side of booze and barely that were spread out a bit more wide than unwanted.

"Let's give 'em a burning bath!" the kid shouted, a signal for a cocktail of the explosive variety. The veteran made some silent signals to one of the slim and faster black boys who had attested to being in the army as well. The boy nodded and shot across the room, dodging bullets and blazing gunfire. He hopped over the bar where the bartender sat quivering and asked for the necessary ingredients.

"One of em's behind the bar!" a police officer exclaimed. "Throw something!"

"I got it" another officer said. He made a run for the bar and jumped in the air, shooting bullets from his pistol as he fell. The fate of the black boy behind there was unknown but still obvious. The kid grit his teeth and switched his ammo clip to prepare for more return fire.

"Waste of booze anyway" the old Indian said.

"Right" the kid agreed. He cocked his gun and prepared, with a grin of excitement, to carve his path right out that door. He shot up, aimed down his barrel...

Nothing. Blackness. That was it. No heroic symphony or glorious chorus. Just blood out the back of his head that splattered onto someone else's cover. His last physical act was to shoot a muted burst from his gun as his body was thrown backwards, the gun knocked loose from his hand. The intense regret of an after-life ordeal, watching that body continue to be unliving, was a sting that his heart couldn't endure. Still, there was more to see.

* * *

Once there was a boy, a young man with incredible physical talent and a mind of an expert soldier. He was stolen away from his home and forced to train himself nearly from the days he could walk to be a perfect warrior. This man won the Second World War single-handedly under the veil of the Nazi smoke and the Allied Force's noise. He was nicknamed 'Jormungandr' and was deemed a perfect creature of destruction. However, as all good war machines break down and suffer disrepair, Jormungandr died. Those that made him refused to give up on him, however, and took of his body the most prime of his DNA to create even more of him...

_It's too much..._

The clones they made were then programmed to be even better, ruthless assassins capable of overthrowing entire nations at the snap of a man's fingers.

_Turn it off! I'm done! I don't want to hear it anymore!!!_

Things took a turn for the worse, however, as this new generation of monsters became sentient. The spawn of the snake, the 'World Serpent' unit of para-military research and development fell apart as one of its creations went berserk, gained self awareness and took on the name of its previous form. Jormungandr was reborn, the true World Serpent, only to be killed by an inferior, glitched version of himself abandoned at the doorsteps of a prospective couple somewhere in surburbia.

_SHUT UP!!! SHUT THE FUCK UUUUPP!!!!_

His screaming stayed only his his head. Tom's fake life played out before him, all the pain of being a soldier without a purpose. His entire life was built on the literal building blocks of another, much more affluent man whom he could never live up to anymore. Still, as the worst of his kind, he was the last to survive. He had defied the regulation of evolution and outlived the better, stronger, faster, better of his species. A man without a soul, a vessel without a purpose, a program without a directory.

Tom felt all of his life's emotions as the sad stories of fallen heroes and fallen friends passed before his eyes, but it was still only one of many. His punishment continued in the relic-adorned stone hall of the mysterious place so far away from the world as he suffered through himself. Tom cried through his suffering, shedding tears of hate. Self hate, world hate...

Hate.


	64. Nostalgia, Reminiscience and Lament

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

God Sight. No, something more than that. That's what he has come across now. Something incredible and volatile, something scary and strange, something beyond his comprehension in the form of a divine gift from high above, or far down below. He couldn't say which, but private Samuel Corazo had just attained a state of inhumanity far above that of his deceased inhuman peers. The sole survivor of a cosmic lightning blast, Sam could see **everything**. That made him uneasy.

Finally, after so long of being unsure of himself, and after the rain had just stopped and the thin beams of moonlight began shining again into the newly blasted clearing, Sam stood up and looked at the ground. His head was aimed high up and the black space within his eyes didn't move. It just swirled endlessly around itself in a perpetual collapse of gravity and motion that imploded and exploded at once.

"What is this...?" he asked, retaining his uncertainty. The invading consciousness had gone away, he was alone now. Alone in a hostile jungle in the middle of what looked like a bomb drop. Trees were blown and buckled away from the impact, a huge black scorch mark was on the jungle floor. A few weak fires flickered in blue flames of arcane heat. Sam ignored all of this and searched around with his ultimate vision to find the remains of a gun that had slammed against a tree. The barrel was bent but the rest of it was intact. Sam struggled to adjust himself to moving in this bizarre state but was able to easily regain his bearings after pacing in small, practice steps.

"Whatever happened" Sam began, "at least I'm still alive. That counts for something. Those guys, though...no, they're dead. They died in a war. I can't get sad over that. Still, why did I have to live through that? It wasn't normal lightning, that's for fucking sure..." Even in Sam's limited understanding he was able to gather himself and grab the rifle. It was warm, like he pried it from the cradle of a recently deceased soldier. He took a pair of pliers he kept on his belt, regulation for various purposes, and bent the rifle back to a perfect straight angle. He only knew it was perfectly straight by testing it and firing into the bushes.

"GYAAH!!!" a voice shouted in pain. Sam dropped his arms but kept his weapon and rushed over. Beyond the shrubs he shot through was a body that writhed in pain at the bullet in its upper chest. Sam had pierced through the trachea and the guerrilla was drowning on his own pooling blood. Sam looked at him the same way he looked at all the others, all the hopeless living corpses that awaited their unfortunate destruction. He simply didn't. He averted his gaze and merely picked up the weapon the man was carrying, a basic, scope-less hunting rifle with dulled viewing notches. Nothing special...in his hands. Sam discarded his cumbersome, recoil- prone automatic and picked up the rifle.

He checked the ammo. A single-bolt style rifle. He checked the overall condition. Aside from a few muddy marks and thin scratched lines it was perfect, a rifle rarely used. The barrel was good too. If this man was going to kill Sam with the rifle he certainly could have done it. Sam searched the corpse, ignoring its human face, and found a belt of ammo stowed just under the rain-protective coat.

He took the belt and equipped it around his waist, discarding a few other unessential things like his fractured canteen and his pack of condoms which had stored no water as of yet and were now essentially useless. He kept his multi-purpose tool, knowing it would prove useful eventually as it always does. He kept his flak jacket just in case as well, and most importantly he kept his reflective glasses.

He didn't want to see his own eyes. Why should his enemies be subjected to seeing them as well.

"Now then" he said, hoisting up the rifle and turning around. "I can't figure this out on my own, it seems. I don't think anyone an help me right now...but I'm in the middle of a war right now. **I can't go feeling sorry for myself just because I was dealt a shitty hand. I've got to press on...**" And so, ever the soldier, ever the emotionless bastard raised on the fragility of youth in a poor, rotten home, Sam rushed off for better fields beyond the trees where he saw, through his amazing eyes, an enemy camp just over the hill.

For half the night he climbed the mountain until he was back in the shade as the sun hid behind the rough tree-covered terrain. He napped, closing his eyes out of habit, but still seeing the universe shift. When sleep came over him, which he knew by watching his peaceful demeanor and his slowed breathing, he continued to view the world out of consciousness. He watched the grass grow in the fields of Switzerland, a place he always wanted to visit. He saw the mute flamingos of Africa as they danced about in their odd little ways before running away after one was snatched and devoured by a fierce lion. He scanned the horizons of the frozen Russian north from high above and saw the whales swimming and feeding far below.

He saw everything, and he only thought it was a dream. When he woke up he wanted to believe it was a dream. He did believe it was a dream and hoped that he was at home, the same as every morning, nostalgically enjoying the bickering of his parents and siblings and their offspring and the neighbors shouting through the walls, joining in whenever they pleased. But it wasn't a dream, and it never was. He awoke and watched himself wake and was so startled that he shouted so loud the enemy sentries heard him at their posts. He shut himself up and watched them as they shifted to the noise with guns to their shoulders.

"_You hear something?"_ one asked in the language they naturally spoke.

"_Probably a monkey"_ he answered.

"_A monkey being raped, probably"_ the other added and went back to watching and waiting.

* * *

His eyes turned out to be better than any possible military grade scope he could ever have used. He was able to measure the exact distance, see the heads of his enemies from any angle and time his shots exactly between their radio reports to make it seem as if they had simply finished their contact. He was able to annihilate each member of the opposing force outside the make-shift headquarters tent where he saw several ranked soldiers being held hostage under rope and bayonet. Now he just had to rescue them using his empty rifle and multi-purpose tool as weapons.

"I just wonder" Sam thought aloud as he trekked through the unguarded jungle, "what the human mind looks like as it dies..." Such a morbid thought to cross a soldier's mind in the midst of a mission. He knew it was a distraction that he couldn't deal with, but it was still a thought to entertain him as he resumed his mission by picking up a rifle from the corpse of one of his victims.

"_ENEMY! ENEMYYY!!!"_ Called one patrolling soldier. Sam cursed himself for not seeing him sooner and shot him down with the semi-automatic rifle. More soldiers were coming. He saw the dust kick up from their steps and the creases folding in their pants as they moved. He hid in plain sight, watching their eyes as they scanned fruitlessly and checked the freshly killed body.

"_Where did he go?_" one asked.

"_False alarm?"_ another added with a hopeful inflection.

"_This guy doesn't look like a false alarm"_ a soldier looking over the body said.

"_Everyone's dead"_ another added with fear. _"It must be a sniper! Up on the hill!"_ A few minutes too late on the uptake and the draw of their guns. They scattered and headed up to the broad ramparts of the wall to act as replacement sentries. Three guards were still pacing inside the tent. Sam poised his gun and aimed carefully to shoot expertly through the thin canvas walls, right between the banisters of the beds and the posts that held the tent up. One guard went down with a groan. Another went down with a scream. The last one went down with a disgusting gurgle from the bullet blowing a shallow hole through his throat. The G.I.s in binds were too confused to be happy until their savior Sam came through the tent, bullets chasing him in futility.

"Heads down!" Sam commanded. The company went to the ground to avoid the random spray of fire that came their way. Sam went to work with his handy little knife as a bayonet and sliced the ropes of all the soldiers, keeping a stern watch on his back where the rebellious survivors fired at. "We're going out the back of the tent" Sam shouted above the whiz of gun fire. A berserk soldier was preparing to charge into the tent. Sam took a soldier's gun from his hip holster and shot the charging maniac before he could even get inside. The body dropped halfway into the tent. The soldiers were stunned with awe.

"Nice shot!" a soldier praised. Sam kept himself emotionally flat and just went about freeing his comrades.

"Let's go now" Sam said. The enemy was reloading and regrouping to change position. A few of them began circling around the tent from both sides. Sam made the motions for the soldiers armed with their own guns to watch their flanks. Once the tent was cut with the handy-dandy bayonet the soldiers snapped to their respective sides and got the surprise initiative on the charging rebels. They all escaped into the jungle and followed Sam to the nearest base which took all day to hike to. Under Sam's leadership the finest soldiers of the army, a group that had been magnanimously praised for their amazing tactics, power and endlessly blood-thirsty drive, had been rescued.

Sam was instantly placed into that group for the duration of the theater. His omnicience allowed him the insight and strategic advantage that turned the quelling of civil strife into a full-out genocide. Villages were burned that harbored even a single rebel operative. The message of total intolerance to the soldier occupation was sent out and, in mere months, the country became a city-state under the stressed thumb of the mighty military man. Sam had grasped an entire country with his eyes and squeezed it within an inch of its life.

Then the war ended and the drafted many were returned home as changed men. Some for the better, with a new love of the life they were forced to leave, some for the worse who came back less human to those who showed them nothing but love. Sam came back and expected something, anything, to show that his family was proud, but the second he stepped onto his homeland soil he knew that he was alone. In the course of his stay in the war-torn country he used his sight many times to check on his family, out of the nostalgic care that he had for them despite the hardships they brought him.

They were all dead. His oldest brother went mad with schizophrenia and killed them all. He even raped his sisters and ate his father. Now he too was dead, sent to the chair of no return. Sam was alone now, utterly alone, but it didn't bother him. He just departed into the world with his superior eyes and sought out the path that would lead him to a better existence.

* * *

Such a path was never found. Less than a year after his return, Sam was a cold and lonely hobo sitting in the alley with other hobos who were equally lonely and twice as smelly. He had nowhere to go, no hope to seek, nothing to truly live for. He had abandoned his life and his hope and now spent all his time scavenging the garbage and stealing with his awesome powers to sustain himself and the creepy-ass chihuahua that followed him everywhere. The mad chihuahua with the lobotomy scar and the vicious eyes....

Eventually, in the throes of his depression, Sam wandered out of his alley for too long and returned to find his spot taken by a lonesome romantic vagrant wearing detailed purple and black with a **tall, white bakers hat.** Sam wanted to get his spot back, still a territorial human being, but the point remained unseen for him to reclaim such a useless spot of land as that. Instead he wandered into the park, unaware that some other awesome sight was following him, envious of the powers he hid behind thick glasses.

"I am lost" Sam moaned in the darkness under the trees. "I'm so...fucking lost. I can see everything at all times, but still, why am I so lost? I should be able to find a path to walk, some road to travel but I...There's nothing for me anymore!" The realization of his worthlessness began to sank in finally and Sam broke down to cry. A strange young man, sporting unshaven stubble and a dirty army jacket, sat crying on a park bench while some demonic force broke through the darkness to greet him.

"You cold, human?" the demon asked. Sam sniffed and shook his head in rejection. His jacket kept him warm. "Are you going to kill yourself?"

"No" Sam answered, sniffing back his sadness through his nose. "Why should I? What would that solve?"

"Lots of things" the demon said. "World hunger!"

"I don't want to die" Sam said "until I find out the secrets of these eyes I have."

"I like your eyes" the demon said, stepping into the dim light. Psycho Doughboy, he was once called, now pieced shoddily back together as an insane-looking recycled plastic and Styrofoam monster sewn together and taped up by some blind, insane three-armed man. "They're much deeper than a normal human's eyes. Have you been to war?" Sam finally looked up and let slip the sight of his terrible eyes out of the rim of his thick glasses.

"Who are you?" Sam asked.

"Don't ask such an impossible question to me" Doughboy said. "Ask me something different, like what I am or where I came from. **GIVE ME YOUR EYES!!!**" Sam leaped up and used his military training to work up the adrenaline to move himself over the bench just as a wood-shattering battery of pitch-black tentacles came storming at him. He took off in a flight of retreat. Doughboy took back its extended, wriggling madness within its stitched up shoulder and widened its terrible smile.

_I can see him_ Sam thought, watching the demon as it pursued, floating above the ground in a flaming aura of black, twisting insanity. _He's chasing me._ Sam ducked into an alley, tripped over a bum in his way and sprinted across the street. The hobo was torn into bloody shreds by Doughboy's rampaging tentacles and sent in scattered, shattered bits into the street. Late-night drivers swerved when the bloody bits splashed on their windshields and nearly hit Sam who, in his omniscience, was able to roll out of the way just in time. He drew out his trusty bayonet and blocked one of the sharper, serrated daggers on the end of one of the black tentacles with a quick slice.

The battle didn't last long. Even with his superior vision Sam was instantly overwhelmed and bound up in the black, slithering shackles of the incarnate madness. Doughboy was disassembled into the torn parts of his two conglomerated entities and the grinning, crazy face of PsychoDoughboy came riding a tentacle to face down Sam.

"I want to pluck them out" Doughboy growled, "like grapes. Like big, squishy grapes." Sam didn't struggle. Even in his omniscient sight he saw no way out. "But I won't. That would imply that I need them. If I want to beat _him_ and force him back into my hands, I need to eliminate the same things he is seeking to annihilate. That way he will see that I am always at the end of _his_ path, no matter what he tries to do!"

"You think I give a flying, fatherless fuck?" Sam asked flatly. "Just let me go and kill me if you want. The only regret I have is not knowing more about my own damn eyes."

"I won't kill you" Doughboy hissed. "**I just want your eyes...**" And so a deal was silently struck where the demon that used Johnny began newly using another unprovoked killer. Doughboy's ability to attract insanity was impeccable. Eventually the negotiations were reached properly and, in return for a redemption of life, Sam would find a man named Nny...

* * *

A black storm of crystal rain and glaring, white lightning shook the skies one night. It had been a year, a full year, since the deal between demons was reached and Sam had had enough. With his omnipotence and incredible abilities he was able to understand people in ways he could have never imagined by looking through their skulls and watching their synapses spark to and fro. He had a perfect understanding of what brought fear and what brought joy, and through that he was able to negotiate the perfect mergers and acquisitions of major firms and companies to form his conglomerate company _Noches Internacional._

He was a god of businessmen. The few who knew of his torrid past never came knocking to his door with threats of blackmail or blood-lettering. They knew the risk of dealing with a living war machine who wiped out a race of people and emptied a peninsula. Only his closest guards, men who came back to nothing like him and fell into pits of despair, were trusted to be among his secretarial and personal guarding staff. Only those he knew would never get in his way or drag him down did he trust with the secret transactions between he and the demon Doughboy. But eventually those transactions became more and more tedious. Sam never found anything, and the price of his perceived 'negligence' was a hit to his stocks. His company suffered each time the demon called.

Eventually the company replaced the void that murder had left in Sam's heart and each blow was akin to a blow to his body, and he was tired of being beaten all the time. Now, on this stormy night, he stalked through the streets in his heavy business suit and leather shoes with his glaring white glasses equipped. Through his sight he found the demon and was prepared to face him. Just as soon as he made an example of his power that the world had forgotten.

Inside a suburban little house of gray tile roof and sliding white siding a piece of street-side artwork stood proudly against a wall. A Doughboy pastry Styrofoam stand painted with human colors and shadows and detailed so carefully with the features of a tiny little man in a tall hat. The semi-living creature stood silently watching the room all the while, bringing no attention to itself, as the family went about its daily life during the rain. Father, a sturdy and straight-faced business man in glasses, sat watching the evening news while his punk-rock black-clad teenage son paced angrily in the living room, hoping to be noticed for some reason. The adolescent, teen-minded brat of a daughter spent all day texting on her cellphone and reporting on her life on the internet for all the world to see while mother, in her infinite mercy, tended to their every need with a passively pissed neutrality on her face.

"Can we please move that creepy thing somewhere else?" the father said, making note of the Styrofoam thing the son bought and brought home from some street-side merchant.

"There's no room in my room" the son said. "It's too fuckin big."

"Then clean your room a little" the father said argumentatively. "Lord knows there's probably thirty square feet of floor under all your dirty laundry."

"Fuck, dad!" the teen cursed. "If it bothers you so fucking much then you can go fucking pick it up yourself!"

"Watch your language" he said tiredly, unwilling to deal with it right now. His son always had a terrible mouth and attitude. It was unfortunate that it had time and time again cost him potential jobs and success in school. None of this mattered to Sam. He snuck in through the backyard under the cover of the rain while the mother washed her dishes with pruned hands and jaded eyes.

"This rain" she grumbled "better not flood the basement again. It took seven industrial scrub-downs last time I found a patch of mildew." A flash of lightning broke Sam's cover. He stood with a Labrador head in his tight fist as the body slowly bled out from its shack of a dog house. The mother didn't see it, only the glare of the lightning, and went on cleaning while father and son bickered in the other room.

Another flash of lightning reveled a stranger at the back door. Again, Sam went unnoticed.

"This is my house" the father said in an escalating tone. "If I want your room clean then you clean it!" The punk son made a kick at the wall, directly attacking the house, and then turned around with a stomp and snarl at his father.

"I'm sick of this!!!" he shouted. "Fuck you, you old bastard!"

"Don't talk to me that way" the father demanded, standing up in confrontation. "I own this house, and as long as you're under it you'll follow my rules!" Another flash of loud lightning. A shadow lurched in from the kitchen of a bright knife at a woman's throat. The first kill was silent and grim, and went unseen by everyone but the demon the shadow fell over. Sam fled off through the shadows and made his way to set his next trap.

The punk son picked up his display, gave his father a long-held finger as he stormed off and stomped his way upstairs while the father stood silently to decide his best course of action. He sighed and shook his head, waiting for the slam of the door, and rubbed his creasing brow. "That boy" he began in a groan "is going to be the death of me..." He began to walk to the kitchen but some residual sense of dread lingered with him and he turned heel to head for the stairs past the living room and through the wooden archway.

A piano wire, invisible in the dark storm light, was strung up with Sam waiting at its more solidly reinforced end with his hand wrapped up in leather. The father walked into the thread, thinking it was a spider web, and caught sight of the demonic killer in the corner of his eye. Sam jerked back so far that he nearly fell over, saved only by the thick knot his noose made as it hit the thin chain he had strung it through. The father's body fell in following his detached head. The second kill resounded with the sharp singing of a razor-sharp wire but went still unheard by the kids who blared their ears with music in their rooms. Sam turned his gaze up the stairs now and silently climbed them.

The punk son was hopping around to the beat and ragged tune of some screaming, thrashing metal guitar and speed drums. The Doughboy was on his bed as there was no room on his floor amid the clothes and crumpled papers and discarded miscellaneous materials from projects long ago abandoned. He jumped and waved his skinny arm and banged his thin, dyed hair, pretending the whole time he was away at a concert in the front row with his friends. Doughboy just watched with a strange curiosity until Sam slowly opened the door. The song was in the middle of a solo and the boy was already thrashing on an air guitar when Sam came into his range of perception.

"Wha-" he began. Sam backhanded him completely around and then stopped him with a stomp on the foot. He took a taser-gun and carefully aimed it at the boys head. He barely squeaked out a scream before the hooks latched onto his nose and brow piercings and gave his skull a debilitating shock. All he could do then was shiver and gurgle as Sam drained the battery into his brain and left him as a half-dead slobbering vegetable on the floor. He glared at Doughboy, who coiled away in fear, and shook an impatient finger at him.

_Wait here_ he was saying. _I'll be right back..._ Only one was left to leave this murder and unsolvable mystery. Sam took a screwdriver from the boy's hobby shelf of statues and random figures and twirled it around in his fingers before entering the girl's room. She was, predictably, absorbed in her own little work, bopping to some teeny beat and typing on her computer and phone simultaneously. Sam couldn't take the spectacle for more than a minute.

"Wasteful youth" he growled above her earphones. She turned with a start and started shrilly gasping for help. "Sitting here all the time, letting your life fade away. **You are useless.**"

"MOOM!!!" she shrieked. "DAD!!! HELP!!!"

"No one can hear you anymore" Sam said. "That's the benefit of death, though not the only one. The world ceases to matter. Your senses leave you. You can't hear anything anymore, and finally in death, one can have peace. Even you dog has found peace..."

"Not Spooky" she lamented. Foolishly, she climbed on her bed and looked out the window. In the darkness of the stormy night she couldn't see anything, but in the flash of lightning she saw the horrible truth as the last image of her life. The corpse of her dog, its tail never again to wag, was laid out half outside of its own doggy house. Sam stabbed her through the temple with his shiv and killed her instantly, watching the metal pierce through her disgusting brain and seeing all the electrical mechanics of her organ instantaneously shut down.

The instantaneous methodical procedures of death had once brought him amusement. Now that he could see them in work, it reminded him so much of the papers he had to sign the next day...

* * *

Such memories were what Sam was forced to view. Not visions from some past bastard's life or painful reenactments of some ancient war but his own begotten memories were his torment. He suffered through them up to the present, remembering each detail of his forced renegotiation with PsychoDoughboy, and recalling the finest possible details of his deal.

_He hasn't contacted me in a bit_ Sam realized. _I wonder if our deal is null now. Perhaps he finally did find that man on his own...that 'Nny'."_ Of course Sam didn't care. He had no reason to.

He just sat back on the ancient stone table and let his punishment happen around him while he ignored it. That was his torture, the boredom of an ineffective method...


	65. The Struggle Begins

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Making leaps and bounds from place to non-place, Mort the Mortician sped through his existence without boundary. He flew through stars and stood on black holes, all in the effort to understand the minimality of his own life as it flashed by faster than he could follow. He was a flesh and blood beast who hungered for destruction, even to the point of finding someone at random to destroy to satiate his craving for that pulsing want in his chest. Just as his heart beat he needed to take his shoulder to the shovel and plow row after row of graves for the fallen society he reaped. He had the indelible task of taking the great and elevating them upon the boney piles and mountains he made with the lesser members of society.

Mort floated down onto a single planet in the middle of nothingness, a single rock in the middle of a placid and infinite lake, and the ripples of his landing reformed his surroundings to just that. He now stood carefully perched upon a single rock in the middle of a wide lake, wearing nothing but an enlightened grin. He turned at once to the mountainous and wooded horizon to see another being of ascended being sitting and crying on the distant shore. He dove into the starry expanse and began swimming. Each time his face dipped under the surface he was met with a view of the starry existence that was his universe, the one where somewhere his real body rested in its neglected surroundings, waiting eternally for his soul to return to its proper space and time. Each time he saw it, the sleeping calmness on his face, and each time the same cord of excitement struck him,

_I'm not there!_ He realized. _I'm here! Wherever here is, that's where I am! I can so plainly see where I am and yet, somehow, I'm here instead! It's fantastic! This freedom! This power! I am godly! I have reached such an amazing state!_ Already he reached the shore and crawled up to solid ground again. He looked along the blonde, sandy beach to see a sandy-blonde woman wearing nothing but the discomfort of realizing her own existence as she cried into her wrist hunched over the sand. Mort slowly approached her and knelt down to pat her back with his mighty, thick palm.

"Why are you crying?" he asked. "To be so high above existence itself, to reach such an impossible and godly goal, how does it not excite you? How are you not thrilled to be living above humanity itself? We are in a place that nothing else can tread, an Eden of supra-natural thought! We are **Above the Stars themselves! How can you be so sad to cry???**" The girl wiped away her tears finally and looked up at him with her sparkling, blue eyes. At first she was timid and reserved, hiding behind the curtain of her hair, and then all at once she exploded forth and embraced Mort with loud and uncontrolled sobs.

Another walker of supra-nature, some weird looking alien with a featureless body, walked by slurping from a cup of juice and awkwardly shuffled by, trying not to look.

"It's all so scary!" she exclaimed. "I've never even been outside my home country, and yet here I am, walking above everything else, watching myself die in a bed stricken with cancer!"

"Ah" Mort said as a sigh. "You are experiencing this all a bit prematurely then. This reality doesn't suit someone with so many ties to their living life. There, there" he said, patting her back. "I'm sure death will properly prepare you for this escapism." The girl seemed to be less sad now, but still not as comfortable as she wanted to be.

"You know what I want?" she began.

"If you would want something" Mort said "why not simply have it?" She looked up at him curiously and he gave her a wise grin. "Oh, you don't know how this place works very well, do you? Here, tell me what you'd like."

"Something to eat" she said.

"Simple" Mort replied. Without any notice they were both now in a world of food, resting comfortably against the soft glaze of a cooked ham with their feet kicked up on the ottoman rests of braised sheep. Even the clouds were edible spun sugar and the rivers all ran with a different flavored liquid.

Again, oddly, the alien was there sipping from his same cup of juice, leaning back in a strawberry recliner, minding Mort and the girl not. The girl looked around rapidly, taken fully in by the wonderment of this new and bizarrely delicious new place, while Mort simply stood up and watched her run around in a flight of fancy. His regular robes and other tactical clothes appeared over his naked form from his remembrance of the concept of want.

The alien remained naked. Why that's relevant is irrelevant.

"This is fantastic" the girl said, twirling about in her sterile-white hospital gown and slippers. "How did you bring us here?"

"With nothing but a thought" Mort said. "This is the place where human minds mesh, the intertwining point of all intellect in the universe. Every thought that may ever pass goes through this realm of thought, and it circulates around eternally as an invisible wind that stirs through this world and all others. Each great saying or thought that has transpired is passed down through humanity whether we know it or not. The only way one cannot access such a place is by never thinking."

"So this place" the girl said "is only in my own mind?"

"Indeed" Mort said, taking her white-gloved hands into his own, wearing a dark tuxedo opposite her elegant and gaily ribbon-and-laced-up gown. Now they were dancing in a gallant ball room under a a glittering ceiling as starry as the night sky and gilded with a regal gold. Among them, dancing all around them, were the masked apparitions of thoughts long ago passed...and the alien, still sipping. Mort raised an eyebrow to it finally, but ignored it and turned back to her with a debonair grin. "It is in your mind and the minds of many. This is, as I theorize it, the universal **hive mind.** That is, the shared space between all living, thinking brains."

A waltz began, one neither had ever heard before, and they began stepping in time to the dance, going in a different direction than all the other couples on the floor.

"But I'm still rather hungry" she said, leaning in and resting her chin on his shoulder. The shared warmth between two minds made Mort grin a very human grin. Then he winced a very humanly painful wince that dragged itself on into a fully tense and horrified groaning face. The girl was biting his neck so hard that her fanged teeth reached deep into the muscles of his neck. Her eyes had rolled back in sheer pleasure as she leeched his cosmic blood, tasting the very stars that comprised his entity as they slithered down her throat.

"That's better" she moaned erotically, throwing back her hair and biting even further.

"Enjoying...yourself...?" Mort asked breathlessly. His physical being was drained of all its substance, then color, then bones, and finally she sucked him up entirely and licked her fingers with an evil, red-glowing grin.

"I always get a kick out of you prophet types" she said, revealing her true for of nakedness once more. The alien looked surprised but kept sipping on anyway. "It's easy to get the goody-goody types lured in with false promises and foolish chivalry. It has been a long time since I've eaten, though."

"What" Mort asked, "a few hundred years?"

"Thousand, actually" she said, suddenly gasping in horror as her stomach began to bulge and her skin split apart. Mort wrenched his way from within her gut, covered and colored a deep red by blood. His muscles were fully intact and working as he ripped his way through her entrails and twisted himself up to face her from below.

"Even in such a place" Mort said "my instincts cannot fail me. I knew what you were from the moment I saw you, **DEMON!!!**"

"GET OUT OF MY BODY!!!" She demanded. A sudden surge of pulsing energy erupted from her hands and Mort was absorbed by a flash of light.

* * *

"WAKE UP!!!" an old and crotchety lady demanded. Mort was awoken back into his living realm of life with the poking of a stick in his face. He stared down the handle of a broom held by the haggardly looking old lady who ran the motel broom closet he rented from her and lazily stood up. "Out of my closet! Out of my building! You bum! You haven't paid me a single thing since you got here!"

"I assumed it was free" Mort said "provided I didn't harp to any self-righteous racial attorneys about it."

"Like hell you would, hippie!" she scathed, forcing him out into the bright world for the first time in what felt like days. "Just get outta here! And tell your little buddy Quindale that his rent's due too!" She slammed the closet door and stormed away, slinging the broom over her shoulder defensively. Mort rubbed his eyes and drew up his cultist purple hood, making his way up to Tom's room in a short dash.

_He's not back yet, is he?_ He asked, hoping the universe would anonymously respond. At the top of the steps he saw the billowing, phantasmal form of Mu standing outside Tom's door, playing a game on a portable gaming device. "He's not back yet" Mort said, given the obvious sign. Mu looked over with his empty hood and stopped playing for a moment.

"Mort!" Mu called. "Good to see you. Hope you didn't strain anything meditating."

"Satan knows me too well" Mort said. "It worries me a bit."

"You're just obvious" Mu said, stowing his machine away. "Don't read too much into it. Anyway, since you're here, I can tell you to pass on the instructions to all the other killers when you see them."

"Where will I see them?" Mort asked with concern.

"Right here" Mu said. "Give it a few hours. Once it starts raining wait out front for the limo to pull up."

"Always a limo" Mort said, crossing his arms. "It's quite the ironic statement, if I would say so. Having the dregs of society like us escorted about in a vehicle designed for the elegant transfer of dip-shit celebrities. It's insulting."

"Be that as it may" Mu began in an oddly serious voice, "the next task shall surely end with an **elimination,** so I would hope you perform at your absolute best! **DO NOT DISAPPOINT THE FORCES THAT BE!!!"** With a resounding clap of arcane thunder from Mu's pointing, skeletal finger he floated up with a swirling and whipping wind of frosty ice. Mort just stared at the spectacle until Mu abruptly ended it and floated back down with a wave. "See ya."

"Farewell" Mort said. Mu moved past him, hovered down the steps and entered his discrete, powder-blue Sedan. He drove away after that, leaving the aching question floating in Mort's mind as to why he needed a car to travel. Mort started looking around at the world he was limited to, the partial scene of two city blocks where people rarely passed by on foot and were always angry to drive through in car. He saw one of Tom's neighbors, a reserved old woman who rarely ever left except to stock up on food for herself and her cats, through the drawn curtain of her windows as she moved about in a rush inside her own apartment. He didn't see much else. He saw a featureless green-skinned alien with a cup of tea in its curled green finger walking to a vending machine....

Mort jumped clear over the railing and landed down on the ground with a thud, making a ballistic rush over to apprehend the alien he saw as stealthily as he could. The black-eyed creature turned to him and squealed in some strange, inhuman way of surprise.

"What the fuck are you doing here!?" Mort demanded.

"Getting a snack!" the alien said in as common a human voice it could muster. Mort pressed his fingers into its squishy body and twisted. "I swear! That's all I'm doing!!!"

"Not that, fool!" Mort said. "How did you get from where you where to here through where we were both just at!?"

"I can't tell you" the alien said with a cough. "That defeats the purpose of knowing!" Mort removed his fingers and sighed.

"Have you ever died before?" Mort asked. The alien saw past the obvious threat and knew that he was asking an honest question, but before answering he had to sip some tea.

"Nope" the alien said. "However, that doesn't mean that it's impossible to reconstitute your being through existential space."

"Is that so?" Mort asked.

"It's a more complex technique you'll have to master" he further explained, "one called on this planet as the **Sea of Sartre.** It substitutes a section of reality for something else, or more preferred by the summoner, accessible only to the summoner himself." Mort tried to gather the sense there was in such a senseless and baseless statement and visibly struggled to figure out what kind of means could exist to such an end. "I haven't mastered it, but I hear it's not that hard to do. Just don't give up, okay buddy?" He patted Mort's solid shoulder with his three-fingered green hand and gave him a grin with his narrow mouth before sipping more tea and walking off, totally unnoticed in his terry-cloth bathrobe and slippers. Mort was as disgusted as he was confused and paced out to the sidewalk along the street to impatiently wait for the limo. The sun was shining brightly and not a cloud was in the sky.

The rain was far off for him...

* * *

Yvonne was by far the most affected by her torture. She couldn't sit still and demanded to wear something plain and unnoticeable when she returned home. She sat in plain jeans and a light baby tee without text. Her hair was straight from the sweat that she shed during her torture and wet from the frustrated eons of pain she had to endure, all the strands individually shocked stiff and flat. Her natural brown hair was beginning to break through her chemical blonde shell and now it looked like she simply had unprofessional highlights done some time ago. She nervously wrung the bat she held in her hands as she sat next to emotionless Tom, who stared ahead with a perpetual look of unrequited fear and horror.

Sam was just as calm and relaxed as he usually was in their company, but none the less he was ready for the next mission. He was checking his gun currently, looking it over and pulling his glasses up to hide his eyes behind its chrome finish and to get a better perspective at it. He checked his ammo as well, clip by clip counting his bullets.

"Shit" he cursed. "I've got less than fifty shots left." He looked up and saw the ignorance Yvonne and Tom were giving him. He didn't appreciate it but it couldn't be helped. From what he saw he knew neither of them would be entirely into talking about anything for a long time. Yvonne looked as jittery as a Parkinsons patient and Tom looked...dead. His face was even drastically pale. He looked cold to the touch. Finally, however, Thomas display his first signs of life as he lifted his arms up and furrowed his brow. He drew out his katana at impeccable speed and aimed it at Sam, right between his eyes.

"What gives you the right" he began growling "to be so mother-fucking calm!?" Sam stared straight ahead at him, then returned to his more important work of checking his equipment over. After sheathing his overkill hand-cannon he drew his leg up and pulled up his pant leg to draw out his smaller 9mm pistol. He checked it as well and made sure he had an extra clip somewhere on his person. Seeing no use in threatening him any further, Tom sheathed his katana and was able to draw a sympathetic coo out of Yvonne. She was trying to express something to him, but right now she was too busy staring out the window and shaking fearfully. Tom placed a hand on her shoulder, a warm hand heated with rage.

"Don't worry" Tom said. "You'll be fine." Yvonne shyly turned her head to meet his eyes and made a loving look at him. His eyes projected nothing but his smile seemed genuine. She accepted it and turned fully around.

"Are you sure?" she asked.

"Stay with me for the mission" he offered. "We'll have a better chance of doing well if we're together. Just stay alert and keep moving with me, okay?" Yvonne nodded without a moment of hesitance with a battle-ready face and tight fists.

"You better not fuck this up" Yvonne warned. "I'm not afraid of killing you if you try and hold me back." Tom saw her eyes. They projected jest, an earnest sincerity that told him she was more worried for him than for herself. She was putting up a front, and her unsteady hands were only offered as further proof to it. Sam watched the transaction of emotion carefully, taking mental notes as he pleased.

A dull clap of thunder announced their arrival to the city. The clouds had gathered to show them the way. Their driver, a demon with four arms and no head but still wore a top hat over the hole of his neck, carefully drove the car into the right lane and stopped along the side of the street. The killers shifted uncomfortably as the door was opened. Mort slid in with two shovels and a chainsaw on his back. His trench coat was absent from his form, and instead he wore his skin-tight, sleeveless under armor with a leather harness to hold his weapons to his back. He sat next to Sam, the only available seat, and looked through his black goggles at young Thomas who looked neither enthused nor excited to see him again. This made him draw his goggles back.

"Is my room okay?" Tom asked.

"I wouldn't know" Mort said as the limo began moving again. "I stayed in my room for the duration you were gone. I didn't want to disrupt your space."

"...'s that so?" Tom said. "I don't mind you using my room, you know. Feel free from now on."

"Very well" Mort said. "Thank you for offering."

"What about me?" Yvonne whispered. Tom turned, unclear what she said, but saw that she was turned around again. Sam grinned and silently snickered. Mort crossed his thick arms and looked between the two at the disruption of emotions and the crackling fissure of ambiguity they seemed to share.

_Something's off about Thomas_ Mort realized. He looked over at Sam with a reserved glare. _This one knows. He seems to know too much for his own good at times..._ The limo continued its cruise until it reached its destination. By then the rain was hard and cold. The sky, despite being the middle of the day, was black and the horizon was invisible past the sheet upon sheet of rain that poured down.

A certain creatures looked out his window with his green, slithery hands in his pockets and stared at the rain with a soft grin. He reached out the window, passing through the solid glass, and left his room as an ethereal burst of light, flying up into the very clouds and watching the mighty blasts of rapid electrical exchange go off all around him. The universe-traversing alien then sped off for space, sure he would someday return to view such miraculous spectacles of nature again...

* * *

Then, somewhere else, from some unknown reach of society, a lone man and his conscience sat under a sheltered bus stop on a bench. His arms stretched across the bench to mark his territory. Her pleated gown parted in the back half-way down and let spill out her insectoid legs like glistening strands of dark auburn ribbons attached to her thin and pal legs. She continued to smoke, holding her lengthened stick just inches from her lips as she breathed out the slithering wisps of white heat, fluttering her darkest-red eyelids over he pitch black eyes.

"So brain" she began, "what are we going to do today?" Johnny kicked himself up and swung in place for a moment before simply turning to her with a pointing arm.

"No" he answered. He looked skyward and sighed, reaching in his coat for something by touch. "This world doesn't spin fast enough. I want the stars to get into place faster, dammit."

"Be patient" she said, standing back up with him. "Waiting for something always seems to take much longer in the final stretch. Just be calm." Johnny turned slowly to her with his pupils wiggling rapidly and a manic grin shakily forming from ear to ear. "Maybe calm is a poor word for you. Suck it up and tolerate it." Johnny turned back around, his eyes glowing and glaring and his smile reflecting some disturbing, white evil.

"Naaaah" he groaned, taking out a revolver pistol. "I'll let someone do my waiting for me!" Johnny shot and vanished. The bus stop vanished as well. Now he and she were transported elsewhere, leaving the corpse of some random victim behind with a fresh bullet in his head and no gun to convict for his murder.

"Where are we now?" she asked.

"I'm not sure" Johnny said. He sniffed at the air a few times and growled. "It smells like inefficiency and failure."

"Must be a middle school" she said. A flash of lightning. Indeed...it was a huge boarding middle school with a limousine speeding away from the front gate...

The front doors were kicked down. The sound echoed through the absolute darkness of the entire facility as eight feet began falling onto the floor, the bodies attached dripping rain water all over the place. Johnny grinned. "Sounds fun, at least...."


	66. The Account of a Schoolhouse Horror Tale

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

0

The four killers stepped into the main lobby of their target building and stayed quietly still in the darkness. Only the flashes of lightning gave them visibility, and what they saw caught the most horrible of their attention. Little children had taken crayons to the walls and depicted, in the crudest of their artistic skills, a hideous scene of gore and murder in a mural spanning the length of the lobby wall. One man dressed in stark white with made blue eyes and a fanged smile taking a knife to some benevolent woman with a pearl necklace and Xs for eyes. The children, meanwhile, were drawn with neutral expressions, standing around perfectly still with their names on their shirts, all drawn in just as crude writing as one would expect form a child just learning the symbolic importance of their written name.

"Huh" Sam grunted. He drew one of his smaller pistols, checked the ammo and cocked it once more, then put it back. He took off immediately in a business-like gait down the hall where the crayon drawing seemed to trail into infantile shapes and more caricatures. No one bothered to stop him, even though his knowledge was just as shunted as everyone else's. Mort made the first nervous motion as his eyes adjusted and stood with one hand on his hip and the other rubbing the back of his neck.

"So who're we hunting?" he asked. Tom was just looking around in the darkness, paying particular attention to the floor, like he was looking for something he dropped and couldn't see. Yvonne was keeping a careful eye on him as he made his squirrely motions.

"I'm not sure" Yvonne admitted. "I'd imagine we're playing some kind of hide-and-murder game right now. First to find someone that isn't one of us and kill them gets the win."

"Sounds fair" Mort said, taking his hand from his neck to his chin to rub it. He looked around and found on the wall an electrical panel. "One moment. I'll try to get some electricity up. I assume, as we're in a school, that one panel only relates to one section of the hall. These switches should turn on these lights for the lobby and possibly the other halls."

"Provided" Tom said, finally speaking up, "that there is any electricity at all for the building."

"It is a thunderstorm" Yvonne pointed out, "and we are playing for the most sadistic freak in existence" she added. Mort rubbed his chin in thought, then lowered his black goggles and worked with the calm breezes of the cosmos at his fingertips. He flipped switches, yanked off the plastic panel covering and checked the wires inside the wall, but the lights refused to be on aside from the uncontrollable, annoyingly bright lightning from outside. Mort pushed away from the wall and cursed.

"Shit. Alright..." Mort was thinking, pacing slowly and staring at the ground, keeping a wide breadth from the other two. "Alright, we'll just go and do this as we always do. I'll stay near Sam. I think you two understand that he's an untrustworthy kind of guy, and I'd like this to be as fair a process as possible."

"We'll go the other way" Yvonne said, speaking up for Tom. Mort nodded and pulled out his trusty, old, weighty shovel.

"Best of luck" Mort said as he spun his shovel in his palms and jogged onward. Yvonne started in a slow walk, waiting for Tom to follow her, but when she looked back she only saw the stark, dark form of his body standing motionlessly in the open ground. He was still searching around for something, and at a sudden flash of lightning his head jerked up and to the wall. He saw something there that he waited for again.

"Tom" Yvonne began, sounding concerned, "if you don't hurry you'll get left behind. You might lose...and get eliminated..." Tom continued waiting for some arcane signal through an even more indescribable time. The rain's harshness increased in the darkness outside and another white flash of lightning blasted light and noise into the building. Once the darkness returned Tom made the motion to raise his mask from under his chin and covered his mouth. Then he took his hands back and drew up a hood the covered the rest of his face aside from his eyes.

"Let's go" he said. Yvonne nodded and they ran down the opposite hall, forking left instead of right where Sam and Mort had gone. Yvonne was tempted to question him, but at the moment she just focused on keeping her bat in her hands and her shotgun strap tight between her breasts.

"I" Tom spoke up "just wanted to see something before I went on."

"What?" Yvonne asked.

"My shadow" Tom said. "In the darkness, I felt like I had lost it. But when I saw it, and it was mine, I felt much better. Sorry to worry you." Even through that black mask he wore, she could see the sincere apology in his eyes. She nodded and turned forward to continue running through the graffiti marked halls with him.

"'m never worried about you" Yvonne admitted. Now in friendly company the two continued their hasty run through the halls, unaware of the dangers that already stalked after them. One such apparition was already behind them, standing feet shoulder-width apart in the hall. A flash of lightning illuminated a pair of steel-gray eyes and deep, black pupils, but as the darkness set again the figure was gone, disappearing into the malevolent air like a ghost.

The walls began to stir with dancing shadows. As the rain cascaded from the windows of the elementary classrooms that shone through the windows on the doors, a villainous movement occurred. The marred walls began to pulsed with life. The four-fingered hand of one young child wearing a wide, toothy grin, **began to move from the wall and reach out into the air.** That very grin followed it, stretching out like a face against the stretchy plastic webbing of a cellophane wrap, **and a new monster hissed into the air....**

0

Sam did little above acknowledge Mort marching after him with his heavy glare in his direction. He didn't care. Mort didn't hold the same precedence of power that he had. Sam adjusted his glasses and tried to change his view by peering just past them for a moment. He wanted to see around the corner up ahead to prepare himself for an inevitably staged attack. He tried, but God save him he couldn't use his magnificent eyes. He wasn't startled. He just adjusted his tie and took a slower approach to the four-way diversion.

_Figures_ Sam thought. _They were inside my head for the longest time, it's inevitable that they would find out about my power and somehow manage to block it from my own use. No matter. I still have the precise eyes of a soldier and the gunsmanship of a God. Regardless of the handicap, I will win._ He casually walked into the intersection and looked around. Nothing right, ahead or to the left, so he went left. Mort caught up to him, saw him go left, and with a flash of lightning jumped as he saw a long, narrow shadow extend from the right hall. Mort stomped and swung his shovel into his hands like a blade, already prepared to defend himself. Sam spun around on his heel and aimed his gun just past Mort's head.

Nothing to the right. Sam stowed his gun while Mort sighed and loosened his stance again.

"Don't get so intense" Sam said. "You're twice as big as whatever punk Hell neglected to pick up yet."

"Size doesn't propagate victory in this kind of battle" Mort said as he turned slowly around. "It's all about one's instincts." Sam met his eyes, but yet again, **a shadow** coaxed his attention away, and his gun went up past Mort's face. Mort slid to the side with his shovel out and Sam shot. He hit the darkness that was standing in the hall and saw it burst like a cloud, then witness Mort as he dove in and placed the polished spade of his titanium, perfectly balanced shovel at his throat. "Speed, if anything, dominates a running game" Mort said. Sam put his hands up and let his pistol hand by a finger.

"I wasn't aiming for you" Sam said. Mort drew away and sheathed his shovel, looking over his shoulder at the stained spot of blackness across the hall. In a sudden flash of lightning, a deafening crack of thunder, that stain was gone.

"I know" Mort said. "I'm going that way. You do whatever."

"Have fun dying" Sam said, waving good-bye. He lowered his hands into his pockets and pressed his glasses up with his middle finger. "This is getting aggravating. The enemies seem to be able to appear at their own convenience wherever they want, while we're stuck meandering through the halls, looking for some material sign of their existence. Fuck. We're screwed, aren't we?" Though he asked no one, the figure behind him nodded with a grin. Sam spun around and was prepared to fire but the lightning interfered once more. That figure, with those wide, steel-gray eyes and drowning puddles of black, grinned a wide and flat-toothed grin before vanishing with the light. Sam's shot was silent against the blast of thunder and spots formed in his vision.

Sam rubbed his eyes until the spinning balls left and looked around. Things seemed lighter now. The darkness wasn't as opaque anymore and he could make out the regular details of the floor and the walls, all of which had the lines of colorful pastel crayons from many a child's hand. Sam breathed slowly and stowed his pistol in the holster nearest to his heart.

"If worse comes to worse" Sam said as he began walking again, "I've still got a magazine of purging bullets. On top of that, if these monsters are physical, I can take them down hand-to-hand regardless of their size." Sam's confidence gave him an aural presence that seemed to stir the walls he walked past. Like rippling waves of air, each step he strode made the lines of the wall wave and twist. Some of the lines peaked just outside the plaster walls and then dipped back in. Without his vision, Sam couldn't see this happen, but he certainly felt a strange disturbance at his back, like the bated breath of some horrid monster stalking after him...

Mort, meanwhile, kept up his guard as he walked in a crouching stride through the halls, always watching the walls where the winds of fate seemed to nervously avoid and waft away from. He was tempted to touch them, but at the same time a dreadful force forbade him from going near them. He toed the center-most line of tiles as he made his way through the halls, his mighty axes of dirt 'Spade of Fate' and 'Penance' on his back as well as the nefarious instrument 'Gore' bestowed to him by his mighty foe from before.

_The forces of the universe are nervous_ Mort noticed. _Something is terribly amiss about this place..._ Suddenly, to the reverberating sound that only Mort's existential ears could hear, a huge blast of air came roaring from far, far down the hall. At the head of that rolling wind there was the figure of a child, a boy dressed in a pin-stripe vest and patching pants over a white shirt and polished-brown shoes. His head was round and large and his eyes, terrible and round, were the color of faded steel with infinite sinking abysses for pupils. From cheek to cheek, spanning his entire jaw-line he grinned and seemed to skip ahead of the rolling wave of wind that came at Mort. He stopped just in front of Mort, far ahead of the wind, and reached up on his toes to tap the frozen black man's forehead.

"_I've got you"_

Mort looked up at the wind, where there was only wind, and was knocked to his back by the blast of energetic fate. His vision was clouded as his goggles fogged. Mort was stunned by a paranormal presence that he had never before experience, one that struck at and stopped his heart...

0

To all those ears not so acutely refined to pick up shift in cosmic destiny, it sounds like the lowing moans of a mass of dying, hopeless children. Upon hitting a wall of such wind, however, it bombards one with the sounds of painful screaming, the final moments of some noisy rampaging murder spree. Tom and Yvonne first heard that low moaning as the invisible force came hurtling their way. They stopped dead in their tracks and waited for the comfortable silence to return to them.

"What the hell is that?" Tom asked. Yvonne cupped on ear with a hand and pressed her head against her shoulder to block the other.

"God that's annoying!" she shouted. The wave of force passed over them as a screeching terror of noise and rolled through the rest of the building as a forceless wind. Once the screaming faded away the walls began to stir. **Reaching hands and crawling feet** came from all directions, spawning out from the plaster-white walls stained with the marks of juvinile hands. Those caricatures of children became real children, as anatomically correct as such children would believe their own art to be. On each of their chests was a name, their name, and on their young faces a disgusting look of murder.

Tom drew his sword and automatically attacked, losing himself to the blade. He cut one bowl-cut boy's head from his slim, childish shoulders and kicked the body away. As the head fell he jumped up and used his other leg to kick the head into the body. When both feet met the ground again he hopped backwards and landed in his pose. One was down. Yvonne was just stunned to watch it. In keeping her attention spread, she saw some dark apparition coming up from behind, running on all fours like a deranged animal, ready to pounce at Tom's undefended back.

"Duck!" Yvonne shouted. She made a swing for Tom's face and he ducked just as the child went gliding through the air. Her bat made a mess of the child's face and she swung his little body down to the floor where he bounced away and gathered himself up to his palms and toes again, like a total animal. He shook the plastic-dripping blood, it looked like a stream of crayon red color, from his shattered nose and glared up at her with his innocent, round eyes.

"What the fuck are these things?" Tom asked. The one he chopped down had slowly dissolved into a puddle of plastic color, a mound of fused and melted crayons. The others took small, child-sized steps forward and glared up at the taller kids through the devious shadows of their brows.

"Hey you!" a young girl demon exclaimed. Yvonne tensed up and turned to see a long-haired little girl in a ink shirt and long, red skirt with the name 'Rachael' across her chest, pointing to her face. "Are you scared?" she asked, her tone mocking in its innocence. Yvonne straightened up and pulled out her shotgun. That threat forced the other demonic things to pounce with ravenous, nail-toothed maws open like traps. Yvonne fired a shot and let the shotgun's force carry itself in a circle around her finger. She spun it twice before throwing another swing across her body and bashing one child past Tom who sliced the creature in half as it flew past him.

One childish thing got an advantage and snuck in under Yvonne's radar, crawling along the ground and grinning up. Yvonne noticed it too late when it made a sliding kick and tripped her over. Two boys, 'Mark' and 'Devon', both round in the face and one round in his belly, pounced on her chest and began squeezing her breasts, wringing them with both hands and paralyzing Yvonne with pain.

"You got big hooters!" Mark, the round one, said. Tom decapitated both of them, kicked Yvonne's arm up and grabbed her hand to drag her to her feet. Her plain shirt seemed discolored where they touched, very light smudges of color.

"We need to get out of here" Tom said as he sheathed his sword and kicked a group of pouncing children away with a single, swift turning kick. He spun on his heel and around to meet Yvonne, chest to chest. They met eyes, though it held no meaning, and Tom took her under his arm to help her run away with him. As they retreated he sprayed fire behind him while she held up her breasts and breathed in pain.

"Little pricks!" Yvonne growled. "Pervy little bastards. Fucking shit-stains!" Tom stopped in the middle of a hall where the lines on the wall were wiggling like waves. The children rose up, one by one, and kept glaring ahead with their terrible smiles still showing all their fangs.

"Hey, girl!" Rachael again called. Her face had been blasted mostly off, leaving her missing from her right eye back and exposing a pinkish inner coloring of her crayon body. "You should be scared! Really, really scared!"

"That's right!" the others agreed, very matter-of-factly, keeping their hideous faces intact.

"Cause, you know," she continued, "there are monsters here!"

"Yeah!" the boys all said.

"Terrible monsters" the other girls added in unison, producing a creepy choral voice. Tom reached into a satchel around his waist and pulled out a grenade, very high power. The walls wouldn't be a problem if he got it to center in the hallway perfectly.

"The kind of monsters" she continued, "that killed all of us...!" Such a mad silence, made only worse by the widening of all their eyes in unison. A flash of lightning only made that murderous gleaming shine ever brighter into Yvonne and Tom's eyes as the children began a swaying walk forward. Tom pulled the pin of the round grenade with his thumb and lightly tossed it into the middle of the group.

"Hey kids" Tom shouted, "why don't you play 'Hot Potato' for a bit?" He ducked with Yvonne away from the hall just as the grenade exploded. It was a shaking, fierce explosion that shook the walls it didn't even touch and blew apart the ones that it did. As the sound and smoke died down Tom and Yvonne could clearly hear the rain from outside as it fell swiftly through the cold air. Tom patted her shoulders down as a silent command to stay where she was and turned the corner with his gun out. The ceiling was fractured, the holes in the wall were gaping, and the dust that hadn't settled moved back like a shroud down the hall. What was left of the little demons wasn't much, just the sickly mixed texture and color of the waxy pastel colors that had splattered all over the broken walls. Even the floor seemed stained. The force of the explosion blew the color into the linoleum tile so hard that it was not the only distinguishable color to the flooring.

Tom spun his Uzi in his fingers and sheathed it in his side holster. A maleficent force lingered in the air for but a moment, and the dust moved away as if someone was drawing it in with heavy breaths, but once Tom took attention to it all it ceased to bother him. Yvonne was up and adjusting her bra.

"Those fuckers" she said in a whining voice "milked me!" Tom looked down at her quickly, then quickly looked away. The stains she had on her shirt were too perfectly placed to be tears, and it'd be rude to draw any attention to it if it was bothering her. Yvonne straightened herself out and tapped her bat into her palm with the metallic ting of aluminum hitting flesh. "Thank you, Tom. Now, point to where more of these little tit-grabbers are and we'll be on our way."

0

This school building, condemned due to a merciless slaughter of innocent elementary and middle-school aged children some years ago, is much unlike any other school building. It was contracted during a solar eclipse and built during a month where the moon stayed a bloody red from atmospheric effects. The day it was both started and finished were followed by nights illuminated by full moons. The ground it was built on was a regular hosting sight for many a dark and Satanic ritual not even weeks before the land was bought using the blood money some richly black-hearted fiend inherited from the 'natural passing' of his widowed grandmother and sickly wife. It is a building that is steeped in such clichéd terror and malignancy that it has time and time again been held up for auction to deconstruction companies as a testing ground for their new equipment.

But no one buys it. No one ever will, because no one knows of believes any of the terrible facts about this damned building. It's just a building to all of them, one completed in amazing record time, where many children used to go to school and learn their letters and arithmetic and other scholarly things. No one ever suspects it to be a place of unequivocal evil. No one ever suspects the obvious places like this to foster such malcontent spirits to perpetually haunt and ensnare the intruders in such grim, blood-stained claws.

No one knows but those who choose to forget it. One such man now stands at a window, looking out to an infinite expanse of otherworldly plains and rolling hills.

"What the fuck...?" Johnny said as he moved slowly away from the window. It was an aggravated exasperation, not one of undying curiosity and strangeness. "Now where am I?" He sat down at one of the tiny, kiddy desks and kicked his heels up onto another desk platform. His conscience just sat and smoked, now wearing a plaid and pleated high-school skirt and a matching top with her hair up in buns. Her legs were slender, smooth and totally pitch black. When she breathed in the insect spikes and spokes all folded up like thick, solid hairs hairs and revealed the dirty auburn hue of her true skin.

"I'd take a guess" she said, gazing out the window, "but I'd be wrong no matter what, right?"

"Even so" Johnny said, "I'd like at least a general, vague observation from something that isn't held down by human logic." So she gazed out the window at the infinite rain and rolling, verdant hills and the solid-black sky. She looked long and hard, all around the endless terrain and into the stretching horizon, and finally she looked straight down, down nearly seven stores of windows which she wasn't even at the top of, and saw the staggering, lethargic bodies of many leaning against the sides of the building. They looked dead and tragic, like bodies searching for their lost, wandering souls.

"Purgatory..." she said. Johnny stood up so quickly that he knocked over both the desks he was sitting on and looked at her with a certain strange, disbelieving disgust.

"What?" he said, tilting his head and cringing his eye.

"Looks like purgatory" she said. "This building shouldn't be this big, anyway. No real building is." Johnny grabbed her shoulder and pushed her aside. Since she didn't exist he could touch her and be perfectly calm about it. When he looked out the window at the ten-plus stories of solid-green walls and dim windows that stretched out forever on either side, he couldn't help but begin laughing.

"Give me a fucking break" he said as he leaned out and looked up through the rain. "Purgatory is just one, big building!?"

"Looks like it" she said, taking a drag and puffing it out. Johnny leaned back and whipped his head up to shake off the rain water. He had a nasty smile and shadowy eyes. His back was straightening out as his head jerked slightly with hissing laughter. A psychotic stream of laughter was inevitable.

"**HAAAHAHAHEEHEHEHEHEHAHOHOHAHAAAAA!!!!!"** Johnny made a hasty march to the door of the room he was in and kicked it in. He entered the halls and saw them stretching long and wide in either direction, splitting off before becoming indistinguishably long into crossing corridors and intersections. He spun two blades into his hands and continued grinning as he darted his head to and fro, his wet hair moving around with him and falling over his face. "I've been to Heaven, Hell, and I've found my way outside of space and time itself!!" Johnny lifted his head up as if he wanted the dimension he was in to acknowledge his madness, but only the feminine figure of his subconscious dared to watch him from within the room where they had first appeared.

"Purgatory" Johnny growled, throwing both his arms out. "Yeah! FUCK YEAH! This is just where I should be! **HAAAHAHAHAAAA!!!!**" She smiled at his tangent. He clenched his jaw and began marching away in a hurry. He soon broke out into a run.

"Run, crazy, run" she said as she disappeared into nothing. The full madness of Johnny would be unleashed in the Land of Lost Souls. A place this building was directly connected to, where so many had lost their way and died only to become a part of this terrible place. This building of infinite, endless, restlessly tormented souls. This is Purgatory, and it's about to get fucked up.


	67. Horrible Tension and Resounding Horrors

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Through the long halls Johnny did stalk, spinning his knives by the hilts around his black-leather hands. He couldn't hide his glee and wore a helplessly mad smile with wide eyes as he hunted an invisible prey. He laughed airily to himself as he walked in a low slouch that forced more of a stop than a march from him to suspend his head from the floor. He was shining with a sadistic glee to find an applicable mark for death in this infinite expanse of wretched souls and hungry ghosts, just waiting for the first foolish creature to jump out at him in the desperate attempt at scaring itself up a meal.

And such a creature made that move. From the wall, some distance behind Johnny, slipped out a pudgy, sausage-fingered little boy with a wonky and buggy eye and short patch of orange hair on his round head. He was drooling, two snaggled teeth sticking out of his mouth, slobbering over the skinny walking meal to be. He saw no Johnny in all black but a dark-roast flavored Meaty Stick instead, and began a quiet stalking walk after Johnny. He breathed heavily, as heavy as he was to breathe, and broke out in a short-legged waddling rush. Johnny calmly turned a corner and disappeared. The fatty little creature didn't let Johnny's sudden disappearance stop him from enjoying his meal. He rounded the corner as well, right into the steel-toed goat-boot that made a long, powered kick straight up and connected between the rolls of juvenile fat to spike his jaw.

"Hey there!" Johnny greeted. He started walking forward, through an invisible thickness of the air as he paced straight through the regular time itself, and walked beside the little flying fatty as he flew through the air and leaked crayon-textured blod from his fat little face. "You wanna play!?" Johnny stabbed him to the ground, straight in his chest, then twisted the knife and hopped back to let the thing recover. He stood straight up, his bangs shading his brow, and spuns his knives in his fingers with a smile. The fat little demon rolled himself onto his stomach like a determined yet sluggish turtle and crawled forward until he could work his way to a wall and crawl up to his feet.

"Wow" Johnny said flatly, "that's a bit sad. I bet you wish you were thinner when you got here, eh? It isn't fun to fight when you're fat, is it?" The little thing didn't acknowledge his taunting. Instead it made a screeching berserk charge with its thick arms flailing at Johnny. He easily walked away form the attacks with his pitying eyes hung down on the creature's round little head. One of its attacks hit a caricature of crayon in the wall and broke it apart. Bloody crayon shrapnel poured out as if the picture itself was dying from his weak swing. Johnny just continued away and finally tripped him with his boot. He kicked him up like a weighty soccer ball, stomped his foot back down and lunged in with multiple, powerful stabs to his viscous, fatty belly, deciding it would be more fun for him to work more fight and anger out of the creature by poking fun at its obvious weak point.

Johnny spun on his steel toe and delivered a full-swing slash that knocked the lardy boy away. He bounced off the ground, breaking the faux-marble tiles that layered all the floors, and landed belly up to pant laboriously in the vain attempt to catch his breath. Johnny paced over as the boy rolled himself to a wall to get back up. Johnny watched him rolling around like a runaway soup can and then watched him vanish into the liquid ripples of the wall. The smirk left Johnny's face and a disturbed sense of dread filled him. He quickly realized that he was surrounded by these living crayon abominations that all grinned at him with unintentionally hungry mouths and sticky arms.

"Ah, shit" Johnny cursed as he whipped around. He spun his whole body to inspect his surroundings, keeping his legs parted and his knees bent while his back stayed straight and his head ducked forward. He was ready not to fight at the first threatening sign of movement, but he was ready to run, or at the very least start running. Suddenly he saw a scream on the wall. Through the darkness he watched the crayon drawing of a girl with a ponytail and big, hollow eyes, screaming and clawing at her 2-dimensional prison for freedom while the fat little kid, drawn in a much better and artistic representation, at her legs. He chomped and bit through the stick-figure legs, devouring them and slurping up the blood that poured out from them to savor every ounce of the meal he could, letting none of it be wasted. A thin arm reached out from the wall and reached desperately for an aid as the girl tried to pull herself free from her torturous living hell. Johnny couldn't bring himself to help, and he saw the other crayola creations shying away from her reach.

"Help me!" she shouted, wrenching her head from the hell within the walls. "Please, help! Help! Help meee!!!" Johnny gave her a cold stare of refusal. The others were too scared to give her even the contact of their squiggled pupils or the pity of their flat, ignorant mouths. She gasped rapidly, heavy tears falling from her eyes, and then she fell limp and silent. Her body was dragged back into the wall while the voracious little cretin made of fat and lard and crayon gore ate the rest of her body with loud motions of his silent mouth. If pictures could talk, this one would sound quite disgusting, and Johnny could see all the thousand words forming from that scene in his head.

Finally the fat little thing stepped out with its legs sticking out from its shorts. It had grown from its cannibalism, and became taller and stronger and most obviously fatter, but now it was wearing a disgusting and crooked grin. Johnny sighed and stood up straight, looking down even more at the taller abomination with a stern, glaring scowl.

"You're a sick little bastard" Johnny said. It snapped and lunged forward, trying to tackle his leg. Johnny did a foreflip right over the barreling little thing and kept it running with a kick to the back of his head, then gave chase and stabbed his knife into the back of its head, slamming it into a wall and twisting his blade so that a sharp, loud crack sounded out from under the rolling fat of the beast's neck. It was still alive, too hard to kill with a simple snap of a spine or so, and breathing angrily as it was pinned against the wall. The other characters retreated from it and watched on, secretly watching Johnny as he leaned in to his fat little cauliflower ear.

"I can tolerate desperation in a fight" Johnny began. "That makes things interesting. The drive to live by killing reveals a human intent in a creature, and humanity in things is what makes killing them so much fun. That's how serial killers are born, you know. They start by killing little things, torturing cats or dogs or other lesser beasts for their own twisted amusement. They do that because they can see the **humanity** in their victims, no matter who they are, and eventually they escalate their habits to real humans, torturing and killing people so that they can smile for a minute in a day. But eventually, even humans become predictable in their wildest depths of desperation. Only once in a long, long while will you ever be surprised by a man's final words and actions..." Johnny slowly removed himself from the fat demon and gently kicked him into the wall.

"I've lost interest in you" Johnny said "because you've lost your humanity as a beast. Without that...." Johnny wanted to go on, he had a lot to say, but he heard the soft clatter of many tiny feet in shoes coming his way. A gathering of dark-eyed little children with scribbles and void characters across their chests began a hunting stalk in Johnny's direction.

"Come play with us then, skinny man" one little boy said. Johnny turned full around, ignoring the haunting red eyes of the huge, fat black shadow of crude crayon dimensions behind him. "We can show you how **human **we are!" Johnny smirked. Fuck that. He was grinning. That same old twisted grin with white, angled eyes that educated people of death and introduced them to their final minutes. Johnny was smiling.

Lord knows that ain't good.

* * *

Down one of the ground level halls stalked Tom and Yvonne, walking close together with their guns well armed and their hands steady to pull the triggers. Tom kept himself loose and springy in case of an ambush attack, but by his magnetic lean he wasn't about to abandon the open side of Yvonne, who was much more tense and unprepared. The halls of this section of the infinite despair were still dark, still connected with the real world and the condemned gate that led into this purgatory. The only visible light came in bright flashes that slowly faded off into darkness once more. What light that shined through the windows was bare and reflected from the silver slivers of rain that poured down from the sky, and even with that scarce light it still had to shine through a classroom door window to get to their eyes.

Tom had the aching feeling that nothing would work right if called upon, a nervous fear of failure now that he had someone important enough to protect with the powers that he had harnessed so far. Yvonne was just plain afraid, afraid and still fuming over her tit-milk stained shirt and bra. They were good clothes, ruined by lactation, every pregnant or extremely well-endowed woman's worst nightmare, and she had to wear them like that until they dried.

"Where are we supposed to go?" Yvonne asked.

"It's a time trial" Tom said. "At least, I think it is. It makes sense for it to be. A survival test. Whoever gets the most legitimate kills before morning, I guess morning, wins."

"But it's elimination" Yvonne said. "So wouldn't it make better sense if-" Tom groaned and stopped her with a held up hand.

"My bad" Tom said. "That's what I meant to say. The one with the least kills would lose. Sorry....I'm kinda freaking out here. This place is getting to me a bit. I can't stop hearing footsteps behind us and creepy, horror-movie bullshit little kids laughing up ahead."

"I know" Yvonne said. They suddenly stopped. "I hear that too." Above Tom's head there skittered a shadow. His eyes darted back and tried to follow, but by the time his head and Yvonne's whipped up to catch it, it was gone. A terrible figment that manifested back on the ground in a rapid, twisted dash of a body crawling hand-and-heel all over itself for Yvonne. She turned slowly, watching the shadows warp around her, and was pounced by the contorted body of a short-haired girl wearing a bow and a bloody mark on her chest as a name. Tom kicked her off and into a wall. She grabbed the wall and climbed up it like a demented spider or equivocal insect that could turn its head around fully to glare with demonic, black eyes at its prey. That's what it did.

"I wonder" Tom said, helping Yvonne up "if there's a point system. Some of these enemies seem different, if not stronger, than the others."

"Not helping!" Yvonne shouted. She nudged him away and helped herself up, quickly taking aim with her shotgun and blasting holes in the ceiling, following the trail of the spidery, skittering little girl as it made a rapid retreat without leaving the area it could attack from. She stopped suddenly, leaving Yvonne with a perfect shot, but her ammo was gone. The girl pushed down to the floor, bent in a twisted fashion at her knees upon landing and made a pounce forward. Tom shot in front of Yvonne and stopped the girl with a flat palm, clutching her across the thin ribcage showing even through the short, red dress she wore.

"Duck, Tom" Yvonne said. Tom lowered his head and held up the girl. Yvonne stepped forward with a terrible glower and swung her bat. A homerun drive to the center of the wall where a crayon splash of blood appeared. More liquid plastic mold poured out from the open neck hole of the corpse that Tom dropped and let dissolve into a sick darkness. He stood back up to full height and looked at the liquifying corpse. Yvonne huffed and tied her hair in a ponytail behind her head. "Damn little bitch. I hate little kids!"

"Well, focus that hatred at least" Tom said. "I have a feeling that we'll be fighting nothing _but_ phantoms of little children..." Tom and Yvonne stopped breathing for a moment. All of their motions ceased for just enough time to hear the horde of monsters stop with them. Twenty or more spider children, crawling with their heads bent backwards or their legs folded up over their shoulders or their joints all rolled around backwards were glaring with bright-white eyes and fanged mouths at their meal. It was an obvious ploy for both Tom and Yvonne to fall into. They look back, get overwhelmed and then eaten by a host of kindergarten abominations.

They didn't fall for it. Instead they calmly walked to the end of the hall, took the immediate right turn, found a new hall lined with windows leading outside and began a sudden desperate sprint. The children slowly followed them until they hit the first flash of lightning. Through that sudden flash they appeared all over the hallway like a swarming hive of beastly demons had just burst open and viciously released itself into the world. A legion of monsters, demons, apparitions, nameless hostile entities, all against two inhuman killers with multiple weapons. Once Tom and Yvonne reached the end of the hall they turned suddenly and opened fire, killing as many insects and dropping their bodies from the ceiling as they could before more showed up. They started back-stepping as they shot and eventually burst into a full gunning retreat.

"How many so far?" Yvonne asked sarcastically. She had a wild grin on her face as she reloaded her gun and began a soft laughter as she fired blindly at the ceiling behind her.

"I have seven" Tom said "while you have nine and rising."

"Really?" Yvonne asked. "That's kind of sad for you. Maybe you should stay here and take them out yourself." Tom pulled out a grenade with a pulled pin and pushed out the detonation lever.

"You're a few steps behind" Tom said. He took her in his arms and tackled his way into a classroom. A huge explosion shook the walls from outside. He let go of Yvonne, ordering her with a calm hand to stay while he checked, and drew his sword. He ducked back into the hall, ready to draw, but found no need and calmly stood back up. "Let's go" he called. Yvonne hurried out and saw the slaughter, a thick mess of melted plastic colored a gory and chunky shade of dark red.

"Couldn't you be a bit more flashy?" Yvonne asked, trying to stir up some conflictual entertainment. Tom remained stoic. He was already walking away, keeping a calm pace until she caught up with him. Yvonne looked between points rapidly and began walking after him. She saw the terrible mess start to deteriorate and broke to a jog that Tom followed. The walls were moving again...

Nothing good happens when the walls start to move.

* * *

Sam continued in a march through the halls, ignoring the moving walls, keeping his eyes set to the path ahead that he beat with the swinging fists of his mind. He mowed through the thick, jungle rot of strangeness and stagnant, airy doom and paved himself a dirty foot-beaten road into the darkness, unsure of anything that he would encounter but ever certain of his ability to fight it. He kept one hand out in the open as a warning, for all the monsters to evaluate the lethality individually and assess the risk of angering that hand, and the other hand in his pocket as a threat. They couldn't see the power that his hand harnessed, they couldn't fathom what merciless instrument of doom would come from that dark, enclosed pocket. It was a mystery for no one to solve, but for all to dread.

Just the way Sam liked it. He was a nameless force once more, a living embodiment of war and the weaponry he carried, a walking turret with squishy parts and stylishly reflective glasses. As Sam neared a long hallway bordered on both sides by long windows he took a pause in his gait to lower his guard and cross his arms across his gut, cupping his elbows in his hands.

_This is wrong_ Sam thought. _This corridor is above the ground. I haven't been walking up any elevated slopes and I certainly haven't gone up any stairs. This school building isn't so big that it needs an interconnecting bridge to extend to another wing. It has nine classrooms on three floors from the front, and from the side it is only two more rooms thick. It's dimensions are totally off for something like this to exist...._

Sam ignored the mistake of reality and set himself into his soldier pose. He walked, hearing the rain rattle the glass and the thin roof above with its constant forceful impacts, more rapid than human ears could follow. Sam kept his eyes and his head perfectly straight, unknowing what illusions would overcome him should he submit to his natural curiosity and look out the window at the demonic rain. For all he knew each drop of water could represent some unfathomable spec of raw, alien force that would probe through his mind and rape his brain like a prettied-up, spongey corpse.

Each step drew him past another window, his strides taking an unusually rapid pace that accelerated him past the speed of a diligent, marching soldier and shined him down as a rushed and diligent mercenary suit, a businessman with guns and knives as contracts and ink-well pens, ready to negotiate someone's head off. Both moods suited him well enough, but presently the unbreakable gait driven by business and diligence was more fit to his purpose here. His soldier self was just an image to him know, one blurred by the blocks that his mind had placed to move him past that forgettable past of his. Each step pressed his feet against the soles of his shoes which stomped down onto the glossy tiles of hygienic green and striped white that floored the entire hellish expanse of wandering doom that he was in.

A flash of thunder cast a wide shadow across the hall and stopped Sam's heart. His legs pumped past it. He no high-rises in the reflection of that violent light, but instead the timid shadow of a demonic little building of stoney green and the long drawn shadowy wall of an infinite house of the ever-unliving.

"I didn't see that" Sam outright denied. He was within only a short break of his gait from the end of the hall when he suddenly stopped and pressed his glasses to his head. The round-headed, smooth-haired child with mercury eyes was standing in Sam's way, his eyes playfully drawn half-closed but his grin full and toothy with the upper row of his perfectly spaced teeth.

"Hi" the child greeted plainly.

"....Hello" Sam replied with an apprehensive pause.

"Do you know where you are?" the child asked.

"Not a clue" Sam answered. "I knew, a bit ago, but time makes fools of everyone. As it passes things always change, and I let those changes pass by me."

"So you're lost?" the child asked.

".....sure" Sam answered, unwilling to repeat himself fully. "Sure, I'm lost. Do you know where we are?"

"No" the child said, lowering his head, glaring up at Sam with his big, round eyes full of deceiving innocence. "I don't know _where_ we are at all." There was a hinted deviance in his voice, just a slight tone of playfulness that made his appearance in this strange place all the more creepy. Sam was tempted to glance back and make sure there was nothing crawling up from a creeping, liquid shadow that had slowly stalked him across the corridor, but he fought the temptation. He already knew there really was something preparing to pounce form a liquid black shadow, with twisting false bones forming pointed fingers and angular elbows that reached up and clawed out a head from the inky evil, gnashing with exposed teeth and a hidden skull covered in the flowing rot-colored sickness.

"Can you tell me" Sam said, slowly curling his fingers, "how I got here?"

"You got lost" the child said, shifting from foot to foot, rotating his body in little swivels without moving his head. "That's how everyone ends up here. They find a way...**but then they get lost!**" A blast of thunder. The child vanished with it and Sam spun around to the leaping darkness. The monster leaped at him just as he made a daring escape jump and tumbled back into a retreating roll. He stopped himself far down the hall and got up to his knee, shooting with dual pistols at the franticly crawling, wet tongue-lashing monstrosity that pulled itself toward him. It roared with a sick voice, forming bubbles from the hot air that built in its lungs, and made a jump with limp, dangling legs following its powerful body into the air. Sam rolled towards and under it, avoiding it, and kicked himself off the ground and onto a wall of lockers. He clinged with one hand to the top of the locker row while shooting bullets with the other. The bullets sank into the sloshing, tar-like skin and impacted hard into the real skin underneath, forcing pained affirmations from the creature with each bullet he used.

Sam jumped across the hall to the other lockers and avoided the monster's next lunge. He still saw it on the ground, seeing the impact of rotting metal where he just was to be a mass of nothing but loose, sludgy rot that pressed the metal down to the floor. It wasn't acid. It was just depressing. The monster growled and leaned itself back, the hips of its torso balancing the rest of its dripping frame while the second expendable limb threw itself at Sam. He had nowhere to go. He just furrowed his brow and curled his lip in anger as the thing blasted the lockers into the wall and then down to the ground where the sludge pooled into itself in the middle of the hall.

"**HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!**" The monster of sickness laughed in a low, growling voice.. It pounded its fists to the ground and began violently shaking the disgusting sludge from its body. It splashed everywhere that the heavy thickness would reach, forming holes and dents in the walls and craters where the sickness pooled all along the floor. Then the monster revealed its true self, standing tall and thin and obnoxiously arrogant, **a busty cheerleader in a red and white uniform skirt and top with bobbing, blond pigtails and nasty, full lips. **She brushed off her skirt and gave a haughty laugh, completely unlike yet eerily similar to the same laugh the monster gave off, just in the voice of a girl.

"Hahahahaha! What a weak shit! I shouldn't have even bothered wasting so much energy offing him! I guess I'm just too hot to control anymore!" She shrugged arrogantly and began a haughty, hip-swinging pace down her hall of red-and-white stripes where the self-drawn, artistically correct procession of her cheerleader allies stayed frozen in stillness as she trotted through the halls. In her smirking, swaying step she failed to acknowledge the two oval orbs chasing her down and turned a moment too late. With curved, blood-letting bayonet armed from within his white shirt sleeve, Sam lunged in and stabbed through her throat, catching her body in a dip as she reeled back. The cheerleader hellions in the wall woke up and glanced with wide white eyes and face-stretching smiles at Sam.

"Sorry, kid" Sam said as he slowly drew the long bayonet from her throat "but I require a lot more than some half-assed, piss-ant effort to kill." Sam threw her body down and held his daggered wrist straight up. The warm blood of the demoness flowed down the funneled curve and stained his starch-white shirt with a deep, moist stain of blood. Sam turned his head and spun around, throwing the blood from his left hand weapon and drawing out a pistol from his hip. An army of cheerleaders, limp and doll-like in motion, came walking out of the wall, slowly forming two lines in front of and behind Sam. Then, all at once, by some arcane whistle, their autonomous heads bobbed up with plastic smiles and they kicked their legs up.

"Readyyy, OKAY!!!" they began. Sam gave a groaning sigh.

Now he had to fight cheerleaders....


	68. A Brief History of a Terribly Great Man

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

He was in prison for plenty of things, among them the murder and illegal burial of umpteen men and women. He wouldn't admit any clear number but at least fifty people were missing from hs behalf. He was thrown into the system like any other piece of meat but his butchers were unaware of the ratio of bone to his raw hide, and they had no idea that he would soon break the machine with his bare muscles and black hands.

He was known only as Mort, short for 'the Mortician'. He sported no tattoos to affiliate him with any outside gangs and wore no excessive weight in shiny jewelry that the guards could spread about in sale for their own twisted purposes. He only had muddy boots and a cultist-looking coat and a shovel that they had somehow allowed him to carry on his back from the outside world. It was the main incriminating item in his trial for serial murder and the guards treated it as a fearful and revered object, keeping it carefully locked away from prying, sacrilegious eyes. He stood tall and strong for a prisoner not yet taken to the yard to lift. He didn't smoke and derived no pleasure from betting games to win cigarette she didn't need. He established, within a day, that his territory was the reading room and he read like a blind man just coming from the darkness to absorb all the visual knowledge he could.

He held the respect and fear of many people in and out. His bail agent refused to work in the same room as him. His attorneys fought against him in court. He was given life with possibility of execution. Two days after the offer his chair was saved for a much later date. He was treated with respect by the inmates, as they knew his life was short with them and even they had the humility not to rape a man already declared legally dead. Not that they could of course. One man tried and his body and soul vanished from the system forever.

No one would try and hold him back. No one had the courage to oppress him. Not even the warden, a young man born into the responsibility, passed to him in the middle of his term at a liberal-arts college, could bring himself to stand up to the impressive presence of this new, terrifying inmate. He had faced down murderers and damnable bastards hundreds of times before, but none that carried such a dignified and human presence. He couldn't shake himself from the reaches of fear that Mort had put him in, and suspended his execution until an unregistered later date. He had saved Mort, too afraid of the depths he had sunken into, and too unsure of how to proceed. But he knew where those answers could be found, deep in the guarded chest of the behemoth man known by no human name.

One day, as Mort sat reading, a group of inmates scarred with tattoos of pointless tribal lines across their faces, one of whom had no face to make way for more tattoos and was just a talking hole with a beautiful remaking of the Downfall of Adam and Eve from the Garden across the flesh of his skull.

"Hey big guy" one man with a lower-lip studded with silver began in a sloppy, spitting voice. "We heard you wasn't talking to nobody. Now that ain't social, is it?"

"Maybe be shy" the talking hole of the painting-faced man said. "Maybe he don't know how talk good to da abhhkkkkabahgghahaaa......." His twisted flesh had folded over itself and strung out a hideous stream of incoherency that made Mort cringe in pity. The leading man leaned in close to Mort and swiped away his book, a timely novel that had been in the prison so long it was covered in dust that preserved its good frame. He threw it to the floor where the sleeve of dust seemed to shatter and thin the book greatly, revealing that it was _Shawshank Redemption_, a great novel about a prison escape.

Why was it in a prison? That's why Mort wanted to read it, but now all he could read were the stingy and ugly lines that creased this boundary defying man's face. He read them for but a moment, then jerk his head forward and butted the studs on the man's jaw into the gums of his teeth while suffering no damage of his own. The man fell to the floor at the feet of his mates who glared at the dark man that stood to his feet before them. He looked mean, far too mean to deal with, and they backed away as he stepped forward and smashed his foot down onto the skull of the man. It gave a sick creaking as Mort rested his arms onto his knee.

"You alright?" Mort asked, applying pressure. "It doesn't sound like you are. Perhaps a better choice of words would have steered you past all this pain you're encountering. Maybe. Though, with your corrosive attitude, it wasn't likely." The man gurgled and groaned in pain, trying to throw out words past the blood from his pierced jaw muscles, but obviously his efforts were wasted. "I admitted myself to this place to follow my path of destiny. Unless you aim to help me with that, I'd appreciate it if you **stop breathing up all the wind...**" Mort stood straight and twisted his heavy foot, breaking the man's neck.

The boys were in utter shock. He looked up at them flatly.

"This is the retribution of fate" Mort explained. "I am here to guide you, shepherd you, to a higher place. It is your absolute fate to accept this truth."

"But what if we don't?" one of the men asked.

"You have no choice" Mort said "because destiny has no alternative. **You were destined to be here and I am destined to guide you....**" Those faith-filled words had inspired a mighty swell of pride and belief in the men who heard it. And those were only the first men to hear it. There would be many more, and through them a revolution of power would shake the prison and the winds of fate would whip monstrously and chaotically...

* * *

Mort's regime only grew from there. Seeing the rampant support that he harbored from the inmates, who were gathered as a single entity against the system, the Warden called for an immediate meeting between the emperor, himself, and a trained line of guards armed with live-ammo shotguns. Mort sat across the lavishly carpeted room from the Warden who hid behind his desk, twiddling his fingers nervously in front of his face as they weaved together.

"So" the Warden began, "do you have a real name?"

"Does my file list one?" Mort asked. A guard glared at him. The Warden glanced over at the guard as a simple sign to calm himself and then focused back on Mort.

"That's why I ask" the Warden said again. He untangled a hand and ran it over his smoothly gelled blond hair. Mort was busy analyzing all of his characteristics and his personality. He wanted to know this man before he could reveal himself in a flattering light. Mort knew how people would operate. He didn't trust them to make themselves known on their own time. They would inch their way out, little by little, worming their true selves into the air and then glaze it all over in a magical brush stroke to look shinier, and better, than it really was. A normal person wouldn't tell the difference, but the problem lied in that shiny glaze. Even Mort couldn't see past the thick stuff, and he could only guess at what would be under it fruitlessly.

"You see" the Warden continued, slamming his interwoven hands to his desk, "the staff and I are growing increasingly concerned with the projects you and the inmates seem to be undergoing. Could you set us at ease a bit by explaining yourself?"

"Certainly" Mort said. He leaned forward and flattered his inquisitor by weaving his fingers together in a manner not dissimilar to his own. It was a basic psychological move, to imitate is to flatter, especially at a meeting of some kind between two people in strikingly similar conditions, and these circumstances were no different. The only twist was that Mort was aware that he did it while most people do so unconsciously, and the Warden wasn't. He only saw it and nodded his head down for him to proceed safely.

"What I am doing" Mort said "is guiding the inmates to a path of peace and freedom from the monotonous boredom of the life they've been forced into. Why suffer in an insufferable place when you can so easily retreat into the life that lies behind the veils of one's mind?"

"So you're entertaining them?" the Warden asked.

"Whether they want to be entertained" Mort replied "is entirely up to them. I'm just trying to accomplish a reform that this place is passing by them. In all honesty, there is nothing this institution can do that well-conducted training cannot do better. These are simply men lacking guidance and a sympathetic, leading hand. They only need more mental activity than they are given. That's an obvious point, of course, that never gets addressed well enough."

"They have the yard" the Warden said, not minding what his words were. Mort sat back in his chair and brought his hands up to his mouth with the fingers curled and his index fingers pointed up and pressed together. He waited a moment before beginning.

"Yes" Mort said "but that restricts them to the physical area, and without proper pan-realm stimulation, the worlds of the inmate's minds deteriorate. They become animals through their excessive ability to work out but they have no alternative for retaining their humanity, their sanity. Why, given enough time, any man left alone too long without the ability to think would become a total animal. These are not the conditions that one would want to operate a prison under, the conditions of an unsavory zoo." The Warden leaned back in his chair and took his woven fists to his face to cover his mouth, trying to create the illusion of a grin by creasing the corners of his shaking mouth.

"So then you press onward an individualist agenda" the Warden said "while uniting the inmates under your hand to manipulate them freely with the knowledge that only you can help them onward."

"You mistake the essence of my work" Mort said. "I only tell them where to go. I trust them to get there however they can. If they can't make it, I never see them again, but so far many people have made it and have realized that my way is a better way to live through. Even in this pointlessly dull life, they can find a peaceful meaning and reorient themselves to the outside world they feel has abandoned them. Most of them have already learned their ultimate lesson, that it was _they_ who abandoned the world, and in return they were cast from a better system and into this one. They are now willing to accept the world that they abandoned. Just watched. Many parole meetings will be passed within the month."

"Is that a sort of bet?" the Warden asked, pointing his index fingers. Mort quickly grasped the arms of his chair and furrowed his brow, remaining otherwise calm. The Warden furrowed his brow nervously and grabbed his chair arms. Mort grinned very subtly. He crossed his leg. He heard the rustle of the Warden as he changes his sitting position. He ceased crossing his legs. The Warden winced as his leg hit the desk. Mort grinned fully now and the Warden kept his nervous, drawing look as the inmate stood.

"I shall place one upon my own life then" Mort said against the cocking of shotguns. The Warden leaned forward again and gave a holding hand to the guards. They didn't lower their guns but their hands were much less tense. "If it would entertain you, then I shall offer my life to show that my methods do work."

"Very well" the Warden said. "What do you propose?"

"I happen to know" Mort began "by experience the local residents of the SWAT-based counter-criminal special operations police are military-trained, most of them defected or off-duty Navy SEALS and green berets. Allow me to extend to them a challenge. The inmates that I select and personally train will be able to out-perform the entire squad of soldiers that took me and countless other down before the state and the people. Should I succeed, those men and I shall be released into the service of a grateful military. Otherwise, take my life. I will deserve death if fate only leads me to failure." The Warden was speechless. He had never heard of such a brash, shameless claim to fame and skill that this man offered. He finally saw the breakthrough point he had been searching for, the are of control where he could take his fear and his pride back at once.

And so he made the strike with his hand extended. Mort walked forward, lowering the guns with the calming push of his hand against the air, and gripped the young man's hand with a firm handshake.

"You know," the Warden began, "the governor will be hoping that you will disappoint."

"Pity" Mort said. "Here I thought I'd get to have a fun little win while I was here..." And so the challenge was set and the wheels of fate moved together towards a dark and morbid end.

* * *

The weeks passed as Mort's training went heavily underway. The contest was scheduled for sic months away, after the winter season was over and summer was in, giving a better chance of ideal conditions for the contest to be held. The specialist forces had accepted the terms of their loss should they lose at all, and began their own intensive training. Mort guided his troops through a regimen of training that bordered on inhumane. He subjected men to starvation and isolationism, without the overemphasis on physical training. His results, when demonstrated, were unmistakable.

Men could climb vertical walls without any grips or holes, just the creasing, molded mortar lines between the bricks of the wall, all the way up to the roof of the seven-story prison dormitory building. Their skills transcended human in many ways. They ran forty meters in under four seconds. They could lift nearly twice their own weight each, they could run a complicated obstacle course without batting their eyes even once from the rush of wind that went past them.

Mort had made machines out of men. He freed them from their minds and allowed them total control of their bodies. They were machines, great human constructs capable of amazing things. They were perfectly crafted soldiers. The Warden took a pride in watching them go about their practices, watching them eat silently and swiftly of meager rice-based meals and then go off to their rooms to brush up on German and read Nietzsche that had been imported through the local library system. The rest of the staff took a much less enthusiastic approach to watching all of this progress. Once the betting pools in favor of Mort's favor had dried up, the guards began to complain that the Warden was allowing too free of a reign in the prison and was slowly but steadily losing control of the inmates.

"Sir" a guard said with an apprehensive demand in his voice. "I'd suggest you do something before this situation gets completely out of control."

"Well" the Warden began, "I'd say it's safe to assume that as long as that man is leading the way control is something that's rare to be lost. He has an amazing grasp of the situation, a much better one than I ever had. I trust him......but I agree. I am supposed to be in charge. I have a suggestion as to how I can gain control while preserving the interests of the prison. Let us...sabotage Mort's efforts."

"Understood" the guard said. "We'll go and kill him." The Warden turned on his heel.

"No!" he called. "No! That.....no! You're fired!" The guard looked down in disappointment and left the room. Another came in promptly after to take his place, as if it were rehearsed.

"What shall we do?" the guard asked. The Warden was busy thinking, with fingers placed between his brows, and in an epiphany moment he snapped with a spark of genius.

"Get a few of the worse-to-run guards" he instructed "and fit them for their new outfits...." The guard saw where this plan was going. Mort wasn't in control of which of his inmates would get to participate, the special forces competing against him were. Obviously they would go for the easier targets. They didn't want to give Mort a chance, and the Warden knew that some of his guards were in a less than ideal physical shape. Some of them were barely qualified to be guards at all, in the case of a riot breaking out that is. That would be his brilliant and devious trump card. Lay a few bad apples with the bunch and spoil it all for Mort.

But this plan still left a sour taste in his mouth and a cold, hollow sweeping wind in his chest. He couldn't simply cheat a man he held in such a high respect. He had made amazing creatures out of the formerly rambunctious, unresponsive and gang-mentality-loving inmates who worked against the system in such crude ways only to get reprimanded. Now they had defeated the system and rose high above it. Even looking down at the yard where these beastly men walked in silent marches to train, the Warden felt like he was looking up from far below. But this wasn't a battle of honor. There is no such thing in the prison system of America, or any prison system. The merits of a prisoner are as good as the weakened humanity that he came into the building with, and Mort was to be made no exception to the universal order.

"Get me the chief of the special operations squadron on the line" the Warden demanded. "I wish to discuss this plan in depth with him."

"Right away" the guard said as he exited to get the phones ready. The Warden bit his lip for what was about to happen.

Sure enough the day of the contest came. It was a cool summer, a wonderful day to be out in the yard, and a wonderful day for this event to take place. Mort stood with his arms crossed, the top of his prison garb torn off in the hot weather to let his tight, muscular skin shine to the sky with its glimmering, radiating sweaty glare of light. Beside him stood the director of personnel, the chief, of the special operations police branch that had taken him down and sent him off to his hell some years ago.

"The rules are simple" the chief announced. "Twelve of my best and most capable agents against twelve of yours. If the inmates win, it's an immediate release and draft into the army for all of them!" This was met with abundant cheering, not at the army part per se but more from the calling of freedom guaranteed by the state and its people. The applause died at the wave of Mort's hand. He turned with a grin, a show of his actual powers of control, and the chief nodded his old and jaded face to acknowledge that power. "However, shoul my agents beat the inmates it will mean a public execution for 'the Mortician' serial murderer, and the inmates that were trained under him will remain in prison for life." No cheering. Not even from the police to antagonize the prisoners. Just a stoic and universal sense of understanding.

The events were played in order and won in order: Boxing, long-distance sprinting, parkour running, weightlifting, negotiation, and finally the team-based sport of laser-tag mission assault. Mort seemed to be in the clear. The inmates were maniacal machines with the humane and sane limits of control. When the boxing match was won and the black police officer was beaten and bloody he was helped up and onto a stretcher by his bald, neo-Nazi opponent. Mort's men acted like vicious animals during the combat game and reduced themselves to stealth kills and silent stalking tactics with their guns for most of the round, but upon winning they didn't mock the other team in their celebration. They stood up on both legs, as if the running and mad slobbering was all just an act, planned out their next maneuvers, and set back up.

Everything was going well, and against all the plans that the state had made, until the final contest came around. An obstacle course. The police officer running it was six-foot one, had the credentials of four years of high-school and four years college football as a running back and part-time linebacker and was the most physically fit man on the field. His muscles were so sharply defined that he made the literal demonstration of crushing a rock between his pecs and grating fine slices of cheese off his abdomens. Mort's apparent volunteer was a fat man who wheezed constantly and hid a can of Cheeze Whiz in his rectum for emergency eating. It was a guard undercover as an inmate, the pivotal part of the Warden's plan for Mort's failure, and it didn't go unnoticed.

Before the match even started Mort got up and surrendered. The Warden left his seat and took a walk. At the starting pistol the fat man took one step forward and his weight crumpled his stubby leg up like a broken, bending plastic column and he fell to the ground. He wheezed and struggled himself into a heart attack and died on the spot......

Despite this sight, the inmates were not amused. Even the police officer who walked the rest of the obstacle course stretch didn't bring himself to smile. He felt a twinge of sickness when he won, for he had helped play a part in befalling a man too great for his own words to describe....

* * *

Darkness and dampness. Mort's closet of a cell housed not just his body but the abandon of worth that came with his stay. In the end his group of soldiers were given consecutive life sentences for illegal activities within the prison, attempted coups they were written as, and Mort was left to bemoan his final days of life alone, as per his own secret request. The Warden left the prison with three weeks wort of plans and schedules for the inmates to follow. He had regained control, but he no longer wanted it. Most of the guards left with him, except those that remained who only continued to participate in their shameful positions as working men trying to make a living.

Days passed. The hours thinned. Mort's last meal was a huge bowl of rice and a glass of water with rice-pudding for desert sweetened with some sugar from the table. He requested a fortune teller lady as his spiritual guidance instead of a priest and the words of their meeting, wherein much hysterical and nostalgic laughter resounded, were kept a tight secret. Mort's final hours drew near, yet the winds of fate around him continued to whip quite violently, dragging him up and down and along the grimy edges of his four-corner cell until at last, they stopped, and swirled around a mysterious letter that appeared in the darkness at his feet one day.....

"It's too dark to read" Mort said to the letter, "so just tell me what you're about...." The letter gave him no response but the sudden vanish of darkness at the advent of a dreadful light. Four guards, all armed, were standing outside the door like demonic statues of angels blocking his view of the light. One grabbed for his arm in the darkness and stood him up in the long hall of metal cage doors. Mort looked around and remembered his place in existence, one that would end soon should the winds of fate that kept his heart moving with their rhythmic dancing pulses die down into the placid nothingness that he dreaded to walk through.

"It's about time" the guard said. "Let's get you moving." Mort nodded, shook his arm away and walked in the middle of the group. His arms stayed crossed and his eyes stayed forward. As he passed no one made a sound. Usually the inmates would raise hell over a dead man walking, but this was no ordinary man.

This was their god.

* * *

A sudden flash of perception brought on but the quick motions of his eyes opening. Mort woke up, rolled back with his legs kicked up and bound onto his feet with a shovel in hand. He looked around hard for a foe to beat, then un-furrowed his brow and sheathed his shovel back on its harness.

"What was that....?" Mort demanded. "That child, that apparition, it wasn't normal....well, not like the other abnormalities I've faced already. It had a much deeper sense of being to it. It was almost cosmic...what was it?" Mort pondered his thoughts for but a second when the walls began to move. Sensing danger, Mort looked about in quick glances and started a blinding sprint down the hallway. The colorful lines and shapes of children began chasing him from the walls with dagger-sharp crayons and pencils in their hands and clutched in their teeth.

_Shit _Mort thought. _I'm no good at dealing with kids!_ Mort ran for his life, attempting to make better sense of his situation, and charged through the winding labyrinth of Purgatory without a single idea of his true place.

The rain came down hard outside, shining dull blades of darkness that drenched the air with the soaked scent of doom and destruction. It hit against the windows in a loud and cacophonous clattering. Its presence rang through the infinite building and stirred the walls. The terrible walls where so many things lived.

They moved in the walls like monsters.


	69. A Time of Violence, a Time of Greatness

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

The zombie children born from purgatorial nightmares were thrust into the hallways from the walls with exceptional force. All their nasty rows of teeth glared and their throats shook with beastly growls as they charged forth screaming at their dinner, a tall and thin man with a calm, analytical expression and the girl with udders on her chest. Yvonne batted the children away with wonton merciless swings. Each swing was accompanied by a hateful grunt. She beat the children left and right, broke their jaws and tiny arms and shattered their tiny kneecaps and elbows with mechanical precision. She mercilessly beat them to bloodless pulps and watched their small bodies corrode away into the toxic, plastic goo that dissolved ultimately into an intangible darkness. She swung and swung, batting jaws from mouths and fingers from hands, until her rage gave way to a delightful glee.

Her face was tense with a manic grin and wide, murderous eyes as she swung and swung, pinning children down and batting their temples until she clearly heard parts of them snapping and cracking under her pressure. Then with one final swing she croquet-smashed the whole and unbruised brain from a child's head and walked over the lifeless body to stomp it to bloody shrapnel before it hardened into plastic and dissolved away. Now her plain pants were styled with the blood of countless innocents and she laughed madly at the moving walls.

"Bring me your strong and your weak" she roared. "I will cursh them all! Look upon my glorious power and **despair! FUCK YOURSELVES IN THE ASSHOLES WITH PICKLES CABAGE YOU LIFELESS LITTLE FUCKWADS!!!!! GYAHAHAAAA!!!"**

"Yvonne!" Tom snapped. He made a slow gesture with his hand, pressing his fingers against his thumb and drawing a horizontal line with all the tips through the air. Yvonne snapped out of it and rubbed her head, looking around at the vanishing carnage.

"Wow" she said. "I got really worked up over that, didn't I?" Tom sheathed his sword and tightly clenches his fists. His sleek ninja suit gave of a regal and radiant sensation, a pure air of testosterone covered in the sweaty arrogance of a man's ego. Yvonne noticed the air and moved closer to breathe it in. "I'm just getting worked up more and more as we go..." And Tom was off, walking at a brisk, marching pace, leaving Yvonne frozen in place. She picked herself up and galloped after him, staying close to him and wielding her bat sternly. They both watched the walls. Where there were windows there were the snaking patterns of thin blue or green crayon lines rolling and twisting together from place to place, connecting the children in one windowless area to those in a more open, wide-walled place. Tom looked out the window and saw the rain, coming down now in sheets to heavy to look through, and he heard the distant thunder. The rolling claps came constantly in from the distance but the rain was too thick for the faraway light to pierce through. Even the louder rolls of thunder were unannounced.

"Let's keep going" Tom said. "We should reach the end of the school pretty soon, if I've been counting our paces correctly."

"Our paces?" Yvonne asked. "What are you talking about?" Tom turned to her and stunned her with his eyes. They were wide and bordered by darkness, unhealthy bags of black and pierced with cracks of red that encircled the tame blue of his iris.

"I made a good guess" Tom said "as to the total width of these hallways from outside. Based on the even width of the square tiles, I can measure the approximate dimensions of the school based on some simple calculations and common knowledge understandings about wall thickness and density...." Tom began walking once more, his eyes focused on the floor, with Yvonne close behind. "We've passed through the mid-point of the school already. The next corner should lead to either a dead end or a hallway to connect this section with a back exit. At the very least we can find some windows that lead to a well-lit area."

"We may have to light the areas ourselves, though" Yvonne said. "It's still so dark in here..." Tom kept his eyes down. He was counting the tiles diligently, measuring them all by eye with an incredible approximation of correctness. He walked one foot covering each tile, step by step, seeing the edges line up perfectly from his heel to his toe. Then, disastrously, his heel contacted the edge but **his toe went right past it.** Tom stopped with a dry, dreadful gasp. He placed his other foot right next to the one measuring and got the same result. Then he slid it over to the tile adjacent. A perfect match, heel to toe. Tom lost his balance and fell, clutching his mouth with one hand and propping himself up with the other. Yvonne rushed to him immediately.

"Are you alright?" Yvonne asked.

"Are you okay, mister?" a little girl asked. Yvonne's head moved to her so quickly that her hair all whipped back away from her eyes. A little girl, far too young and innocent looking to be any kind of monster, stared down at Tom with big, buggy eyes and a doll held close to her chest. "You look sick...." Yvonne snarled like a protective lioness to try and drive the evil spirit away. Tom pushed Yvonne away gently and looked up at the child. He saw into her earnest eyes and lost all his restraint. He vomited and covered the uneven tiles with his own puke. Yvonne moved away and drew out her shotgun, aiming it at the girl who flinched in terror and hid behind her stuffed bear. Yvonne felt a strange hesitance weighing her arm and lowering her gun.

"Please don't shoot" the girl begged. "I'm not like them. I swear! I'm a good girl...they all want to eat me. Please, don't shoot me...." Yvonne couldn't stand aiming at an innocent girl, monster or not. She lowered her gun and looked down at Tom. He still had lunch left to expel, so she walked over and stowed her gun at her hip. She knelt down and placed a hand on the girl's head, stroking her short, auburn hair from side to side to calm her down.

"There, there" Yvonne said. "I won't shoot you. I promise. But could you do me a tiny favor?" The girl nodded, wiping tears from her wide, timid eyes from the fear she still recovered from. "Can you tell us how to get the power back on? We'd like to stop walking around in the dark."

"Sure" she said. "There's an electrical panel in the cafeteria. Just go there and you can turn all the power back on for the whole building." Yvonne smiled at the girl and nodded. She stood up and turned to Tom who was just recovering from his reeling pain and from staring so closely at his own puke. He looked over and gasped in fear. The girl's mouth had grown three fold and her eyes became hungy and gigantic, bulging nearly out of her head, staring at Yvonne's body with voracious rage.

"Tom" Yvonne began. "Did you hear?" Tom drew his gun without hesitance and began firing. His bullets hit into the wide, demonically distended and extended jaw of the girl while brushing harmlessly past Yvonne. Before she could fully form her face in a fearful, angered expression Tom's clip ran out and he reloaded again. Yvonne dashed for him, out of his way, and he continued firing at the silent figure. Yvonne looked back and saw nothing but the red and purple jaws of a huge mouth with eyes and slit nostrils above the thick, pink lip. It was like the maw of a giant fish, gasping for breath and bleeding out from the holes of so many bullets. Tom ejected the empty clip, reloaded and stowed his gun before waving into Yvonne.

"Tom!" she exclaimed. "Oh shit! Are you alright...?" Tom managed to point his arm straight at the floor. Yvonne followed it, her eyes scraping sight along the ground, and saw his horror. "Tom, we need to get to the cafeteria and turn the lights on. It may be our only chance at escaping this hell!" Tom groaned in approval. Yvonne began walking, carrying him over half her shoulder, going past the uneven tiles and into the **swirling pattern of intersecting lines and obtuse, obscene tile shapes that made no sense and defied all constructive reason.** The mad swirling of the floor and ceiling tiles marked the true joining of reality with Purgatory. Tom and Yvonne descended into the truest hell, where the worst demons ran free, in search of the cafeteria.....

* * *

Their legs went up all at once in a line like the rifles of gunmen shooting salute. But unlike guns these legs were built like canons, thick and hard with muscles of oaken toughness and perfectly smooth, cold-looking skin. They were unliving beasts of manifest rage, targets of the whorish existence abandoned by many all conglomerated into tangible monstrous forms. Cheerleaders, demon cheerleaders. Sam was positive that God had disgraced him now. All at once their feet stomped down and they hopped apart with their legs spread in upside-down Vs.

"Ready, **OK!**" they began. Their voices all gathered together in frightening unison, all of them resonating with the same chipper tune. They began their chant. "We're going-, to kill you! We'll tear you up and down!" They kicked and weaved in front of each other, their lyrics hanging in the air on razor-thin wires. Sam stared straight ahead, giving no reaction at all to their threatening antics as they leaped and waved their annoying pompoms in the air in front of him. "We'll slit your throat, break your neck, and rip them off with our bare hands!" Somehow, in the muddled lyric, they maintained a constant rhythm that never broke. When the final lyric came one cheerleader climbed into the netted fingers of two of her companions and was thrown like a weapon directly at Sam.

"**NOW DIE!!!!"** they finished in their chipper swing. Sam leaned back and drew out two pistols, filling the girl with holes as she flew over him, then sheathed them and straightened up while her corpse collided and broke against the floor tiles. The cheerleader legion kept on smiling sweetly at him. The blush on their plastic faces was as fake as the hearts beating beneath a meter of meat each. Sam sighed rather slowly and brought his empty hands out from his jacket.

"Seriously?" Sam began. "Taunting me with a cheer? Seriously? Are you that powerfully cliched?" The cheerleaders were staying still in their final stance. Some were balanced on the toes of one foot, holding their leg parallel with the floor. Some of them broke their cheery faces and glanced at each other.

"What does he mean?" one asked another in a hush. Sam was done fucking around. He sprang forth in an instant and smashed both his open palms, pressed together at the underside of his wrists, into the face of the forward-most leaning girl. She toppled backwards and took down four other girls on her way to the floor. Sam slid to the side and grabbed one girl's open jaw, pulling on it while pressing her forehead until he head a crack. Then, with a high kick, he planted his foot in her hanging agape mouth and ax-kicked it to the floor with a great, sick crack. Her jaw was broken, and with her neck exposed Sam raised his other leg and made another slicing kick that broke the top column of her vertebrae.

One tried to charge in on him from behind, with a kick no less. It was too high. Sam caught it and held it under his arm. She pulled away in struggle. Sam yanked on her leg just as she pulled and dislocated the joint from her hip. As she screamed in pain he juked toward her, grabbed her neck and her hip and flipped her back onto his knee. After a second she broke, brittle as a broomstick, against his power.

Sam rose slowly up and intercepted the high kick accompanied by the high-pitched battle squeal of one of the girls. This kick was far too high, almost at his face, and only one hand had stopped it in the air. Sam grabbed the leg by the ankle and rushed in, his foot leaving the ground and gliding just above it until he stomped it down. With his other arm wound back he rushed his other foot forward and delivered the most painful upper-cunt punch possible. The girl went unconscious from the pain and fell limp to the ground. Sam lurched forward, gave her neck a quick break and ripped off her thin shirt to wipe his hand off.

"You're a sick son of a bitch!" a cheerleader shouted. Sam glared at her, his glasses ajar over the brim of his nose and his godless eyes staring out at her. She died instantly of a stroke and Sam pressed his glasses back up.

"At least I'm not rusty" Sam said. He made a turn with a sweeping kick and grazed the midriff of one particularly busty girl with short, blond hair. She started sparring with him at close range. Her long arms threw punches too swift to catch and the pompoms distracted Sam's vision to make defending even harder.

"You think we're a bunch of pushovers?" she raged. "Just because we're girls? Just because we're cheerleaders!?"

"No" Sam said. He finally countered and pounded her breast. She scoffed at first, but Sam was inside her range and leaning forward. With a low, breathy growl he made a mechanically fast and powerful series of punches to knead her breasts and force his fists through them. Finally, her left breast burst in an explosion of saline and blood. Sam punched inside the opened skin through her stained shirt and started working his fists against her bare muscles. She groaned in rhythm with his punches and coughed up a heavy wad of blood and spittle. When Sam had her stunned he swept her legs out and forced her to the ground, pressing down with his fist and the weight of his entire body. "You're weak. That's why it's so easy to kill you all." The girl lost consciousness and feeling just as she watched Sam pull out a pulsing, apple-sized thing from her chest and **crush it in his hand.**

Shaking the remnants of a living heart from his grip Sam turned around and saw a girl with long, wavy hair in pigtails cast her pompoms aside and reveal two dangerously curved blades held in her hands. She grinned wildly and ran towards him. Sam sighed and measured the length of her motions, approximating each breadth of ground she stepped, and before she could get close enough to stab at him he kicked her knee just as her foot hit the ground and bent her leg **fully backwards.** Silenced and stunned by pain Sam continued forward. He lunged with an elbow to her face and knocked her back. Once she was on the floor he grabbed a knife from the air she let loose and threw it between her eyes.

"RAAAH!!!" one girl screeched. She made contact and spiked Sam's quadriceps, his upper leg, with her knee from behind. Sam's leg went numb for a second and shook. He turned around only to catch the girl ducking down and away from his sight, circling behind him once more to lock him in a full nelson hold, her breasts pushing against his back. "Let's see how _you_ like getting broken!" Sam didn't try to struggle. He didn't need to. He knew how to break the hold. He raised his god leg up high like was taking a deep step forward and crushed it down onto her foot. She howled in pain but kept him held close. Sam then threw himself back with his head and kept pressing hard on her instep. Her leg bent straight back and, predictably, **her ankle broke her foot from the rest of her leg.** Sam was free of her grip as she was too engrossed with the pain that she couldn't control herself, and before she could scream any louder Sam curb-stomped her to death.

The violence was far from over, he knew. He'd only taken out a portion, and a meager one at that, of the bitches. However, when he turned around to look, there was no one there. Even the walls were bare save for the discretely waving, intertwining lines of blue and green. Only the bodies he had just dispensed of were present and even those were slowly dissolving into puddles of horrifically disgusting muck and plastic mud. He continued to look around, search for fleeing survivors, scan the hall for anything left to kill...but found nothing. He was alone at last in the empty hall.

"Jesus fucking Christ" he cursed. He removed his glasses, keeping his eyes closed, and rubbed hard. He couldn't feel his hands as he had no human way of feeling through inhuman eyes, but it calmed him down and he placed his glasses back. When he opened his eyes once more, through the frames of his glasses, he saw the casually retreating form of the round-eyed child in his little suit, a wide and taunting grin on his face. He had just rounded a corner. Sam breathed harshly out and sprinted after him to follow. He would let nothing live for too long. **Nothing** would survive.

Even if he had to beat all of Hell to death with his bare hands....

* * *

The children, stubby armed and slobbering with joy, came charging out of the walls and chased after the succulent, meaty man that was Mort. Mort ran away from the swarming hordes of evil little children with his mouth open and teeth grit in panic.

"Shit!" Mort cursed. "Cock and fuck! Why little kids!? They creep the shit out of me!!!" Mort continued to sprint, his chest hovering over the floor as he made his powerful stampede through the elementary hall walls. He looked up and his face was forced to change. He skid on the smooth tiles, all warped in pattern, to a stop. A line of children wielding oversized weapons themed around elementary class instruments. One fur-headed boy wielded a broad-sword ruler. One manic, bowlegged girl in a skirt wielded a giant pair of round-tipped scissors. Many held two long and sharp pencils or fists full of sharpened crayons, and all of them held the same slithering sneer of razor-sharp teeth.

A line of green, glowing eyes. But the luminescence of the scene didn't scare Mort. Rather, the fact that tiny bodied children held those smiles is what moved him to discomfort so quickly. He seethed at his fate. The winds of destiny only pushed him forward, into the thick of the children, forcing him to fight.

"Can't be helped, eh?" he growled. He took his hands behind his back and grabbed his weapons. One, the Spade of Fate, clanged against the ground with a warbling ring of metal. The other, Agony, hit the tile and sliced into it with little more than a thin clinking sound. The depth and age of his weapons showed both visibly and through their sound. Mort raised his weapons up and closed his eyes. He took a meditative breath and gave a silent prayer.

_Let me live_ Mort asked to the gracious forces of the greater universe _and I shall never complain about the education system again..._ Mort rushed forward. The winds blew in a torrent around him. He saw through the evil that struck him with fear and into the dark hearts he prepared to dig from their chests. He made a giant sweep and struck through the heads of four children. Agony came around and stabbed the head off of a boy's neck. Mort tossed it behind him and the pudgy children fought over it, piling into each other, leaving the battle.

Mort stomped the ground. His great weight and gravity made a shock-wave and blew the surrounding little soldiers of hell away. With his new range he spun his spades around, over his head, reeling his body back and twisting his waist, moving his feet to stay in a spin. He straightened his arms and bashed in the skulls of children with each flick of his mighty wrists, and his attack continued to push him forward one inching step and spin at a time while everything around him died.

"**KYAAAHHH!!!**" roared one demon zombie Sally. She dove under his swings with her huge safety-scissors and made a desperate slice for his feet. Mort tucked his legs up and hovered over the closed metal parts of her weapon. He landed and shattered the weapon with his heavy boots, then sliced off her head with the sharp, unaged spade of Agony. He slid his feet and glided across the gore and blood he had made, then swept his arms and began another spin around. He sheathed the Spade of Fate and wielded Agony in both hands. Knowing that he was beyond the former line he opened his eyes.

**Not a thing was standing against him now.** Mort's fear was absolved in his merciless rampage. His gory assault gave him a sense of victory and glory, even though all he killed were children. He sighed and sheathed his shovel once more. With a quick scan he found a door marked beside the frame with a stick figure descending steps.

"Ah" Mort said. "Stairs. Good find." Mort kicked down the door and let it crash and clatter down the first flight of stairs. Then he walked into the well and looked down. "Uhhh...." he groaned with uncertainty. Twelve visible flights and uncountable more beneath were too many for a simple school building. "I see. This is no normal building at all...I should have known." Still, Mort jumped over the rail and landed one full flight down. From there he began to run, hopping down two steps at a time, leaping onto the walls and kicking off to fly down the stairs even faster. He continued down at an ever increasing rate until he saw a door. He leaped from the final step of the flight, full speed backing him, and drop-kicked the door off. With the door under the sole of his boots he skated with a hideous screech across the tiles. He was barreling towards yet another pair of doors and pressed down to raise the fore-facing edge up and smashed through the double-doors outside.

He blazed over the sidewalk, broken apart by the growth of grass and disrepair, finally stopping with a slow spin in a wet patch of grass. His hands were folded in his pockets, his head tilted down and a bright, laughing smile on his face. His huffing laughter started out low, then picked up into a full chuckle of joviality.

"Hahahahahahahaha!!!" He laughed. "What the fuck is this shit!? What godless bastard force of the universe willed me to be here!? HAHAHAHAHAA!!!" His laughter fleetingly masked the rage within his true speech. He looked up to the sky and stopped laughing, though that jovial smile remained. He saw a broken room over the wide, dark atrium he was in and sighed. His smile became one of tiredness and he closed his eyes to rub the bridge of his nose. "This is getting strange. I'm getting tired of strangeness. It's all I deal with anymore. Is this the kind of anxiety a king of all carnage and murder must endure? The boredom and complacency of oddity? The regularity of the absurd? Then, what purpose is there for me to struggle down this path any further?"

Mort looked around once more. From the broken roof the water continued down but in more broken patterns. It wasn't a torrential deluge that beat the ground with iron-strong fists, but a more scattered force. It was light where it was frequent and where the holes in the roof were more apparent the water gathered far up above and came down in loud splashing falls of water. Mort stopped looking over the weather of the area and observed the physical breadth. He was in a playground manufactured by some twisted child's deepest ideological nightmare.

Strange constructs of limited purpose were meshed and crashed together, the discolored bars melded effortlessly by forces unknown into each other. Monkey bars were fused with swing-sets that were angled into the ground and surrounded by tires. Boxes of sand in uneven shapes bordered most of the metal bars that sank to the ground. Where sand was absent the metal bars simply dug into the soft, muddy dirt and carved their place with wounded holes in the ground.

Mort took a stoic stance with his arms crossed and a charismatic sneer on his lips. He looked around, scanning slowly, and began to walk. He made his way to the apparent middle of the huge area, so wide that the darkness of the rainy sky clouded his perception beyond only about fifty meters. Even then he couldn't see such a place ending.

_What must I fight now?_ Mort wondered. _Overtly physical children? Little jocks playing kickball? Little girls cattily fighting over swings? Little boys playing army on these Cthulian structures? What, and where and when and how? I need not know why. At least I know that...._ Mort rubbed his shoulder to try and brush off a cold chill that covered his back. _I have an increasingly uneasy feeling about all of this. I feel like death is just waiting for me to make a wrong step, and that that step is some where in front of me....._ Mort looked down. He saw a shadow in the darkness. Something darker than the dark, growing larger as if descending, like the widening point of a bomb in the sky.

A true shadow of figure did descend with swift speed. A figure made of blackness with two bright, glaring daggers held at the ends of stick-thick arms and extending wings of an ink-black coat. His eyes blasted out with white. Mort's eyes widened at the feeling.

Descending Madness was came....


	70. Fighting Individuals are Fighting There

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

"What is a human?" Johnny asked. "Is it nothing but a miserable little pile of lies and shit? Or is there something arcane to the concept of humanity that keeps slipping me by? Some ill-defined dimensions of description that apply to all humans which create their individuality? Is there something I'm missing, or have I really seen everything I need to see? Do I know everything I need to, or is there something more to find out and deliberate upon?" Johnny stood up from the edge of a table and paced slowly to the window to watch the rain. "No one really matters that much to me anymore. All the humanity in me is just the shadowed resurrection of what I used to be, and even that was something that all creation looked upon with a morbid and unanimous disgust, like the remains of an abortion half-way aborted.....Class, what is a human?"

Johnny turned to the demon children seated so eagerly in their colorful plastic desks. He had taken himself into the shelter of a room, away from the chaos and violence of the halls, and herein he found an enrichment of brilliant minds untainted by the coursing animosity of the purgatorial hell. These children didn't know of the ravenous, mind-fucking horrors that occupied the halls outside. They were the innocents, tiny souls who never got to live past their first grown-up tooth, children picked far to early from the pluck of life. Pre-schoolers, the only minds Johnny could willingly relate with.

A little girl in the front row, with brown piggy-tails and wide, brimming eyes, rose her hand and waved it around while the others just smiled and looked about cluelessly. Johnny made his way back to 'his' desk in the front and aimed his dagger at her. "A human is a pewson made by Gowd" she said in her nausiatingly cute dialect "who gows thwough wife wondewing what wife weally is."

"That's good" Johnny said, leaning back in his chair, "but it can be better. What if a human finds a meaning to his life, no matter how trivial or dull, and just lives to the meaning?" This time a boy raised his hand.

"He's still a human" the boy said "but he's one who has abandoned the hope of being an individual."

"And what is that?" Johnny asked with a dark smile. A chubby little girl raised her hand and called attention.

"A human can be part of a collective" she said, lisping her 'S' sounds "while maintaining the regular worth of humanity, but while staying alienated to themselves as a person. The lines between a 'person' and a 'human' are blurred but real. A human acts according to life. A person acts according to themselves."

"That's good" Johnny said, lurching his chair forward til the bent, gnarled steel legs clacked unevenly against the floor. He tapped his fingers rapidly against each other while grinning madly, candid from the class, excited and enveloped in the clarity of their understanding. He brushed away his maddened looks and returned to a more sane perspective, then stood up and ran his gloved hand over his forehead and hair. "Let's keep this up, shall we? What can define an individual in a world of nothing but humans, and how can a human properly form himself into an individual?"

"Sewf-awaweness" the little girl said.

"And how is that achieved?" Johnny asked.

"Self-invasion" the boy said.

"And how can one do that?" Johnny asked.

"By looking within" the chubby girl said "and introspectively analyzing all the basic human facets, then eliminating the unneeded. The carnal and the unnecessary must be eliminated in life and replaced with a truer personal purpose. Awareness, enlightenment, intellect, all the way to the triviality of competition and external-self achievement like education or sexual fulfillment."

"Once a human achieves a greater sense of purpose" the little boy said "they can become individuals who live for themselves rather than through others and for others."

"Goooood" Johnny said. "That's a good thought, but let's consider how many true individuals there can be in the world. In which professions, as a contemporary sense of understanding, do true individuals exist?" The children looked to one another for an answer and thumbed their lips to think. Some sucked their thumbs to aid their thinking, so young and innocent were they. One girl in the back with an overgrown tooth in her front stopped sucking her thumb first and rose to answer.

"Artists?" she said. Johnny was taken aback with a sigh of happiness and fell into his chair with a metallic clatter.

"Yeah" Johnny said, under his breath. "Most of us are insane, but at least we're insane apart from each other....that's good." Johnny looked back to the class and rose their attention to him. "Good answer. Artists don't work for money, usually. They work for the sheer enjoyment of being able to work on something they love. Now, who else?" The children kept thinking and pondering their answers, prying into their unusually wide spectrum of worldly knowledge, asking themselves all the most important questions they could understand.

"Potentially" a child said with their hand raised from the back of the room, "can't all people working be working as individuals? Isn't it possible that an accountant enjoys his work out of only being able to work with numbers? That the numbers and equations are _his_ form of art to manipulate."

"Also correct" Johnny said. "That way, potentially anything is correct. A teacher who loves to teach is a common example. A human resource official who enjoys listening to people cry as they get fired is correct. That way, so long as someone works to enjoy their life and their enjoyment of life includes their work, anyone can be ruled properly as an individual."

"So why aren't all humans individuals?" a girl asked.

"Because not all humans are willing to deal with themselves" Johnny said. "It takes phenomenal willpower to evaluate yourself as harshly as necessary to achieve a greater understanding of oneself. It isn't something for the weak or timid, and many people in some regard are weak and timid. Many people also aren't willing to eliminate the masturbatory processes in their life. If you can't eradicate the unnecessary and replace it with the superseding and enlightening."

"What can they do to move past that fear, though?" a girl asked. Suddenly there was a loud pound on the door. Johnny looked through his bangs tiredly, the remnants of his excited, talkative smile still lingering, and the zombie demon monster children glared back at him with flashing steel-blue eyes and acid-green teeth. They roared and barked on the other side of the door, clawing the surface and rattling the doorknob. Johnny smirked and stood up from his desk to pace quietly over to the color-framed window. The children followed him with their infantile eyes darting worriedly between the demons at the door and the great, stick-figured man in deep, dark black.

"To move past fear" Johnny said, his hand pressed on the rapping glass, "one must simply push as hard as one can and **break straight through it!**" Johnny blew the window out with the sheer power of his arm. The loud rolls of thunder filled the air and muted glares of lightning flashed the light from outside, shining Johnny's round, white eyes and glowering grin from his all-black frame. "I'm off to fight some fear. You kids can do as you wish. Hopefully we can learn a little more from each other..." And with that Johnny was of and flying down through the air. He descended with his knives drawn, seeing no walls or ground, falling slowly past the falling streams of water from the broken ceiling in above him.

"That's odd" Johnny said. "I though I was going outside. This just seems to be a giant atrium..." Johnny continued falling and falling, gliding through the darkness with his long, black coat billowing behind him like a tail of wide, flickering dark fire. He tucked his legs up and gripped his knives tightly, unsure of what would meet him when he found the ground. Then the thought that he may never find the ground came to mind, and he squinted his eyes down to adjust his focus to the distant surface he hoped to find.

…_........who's that?_ Johnny wondered. Without the luxury of time or place to think, Johnny simply did what he instinctively knew to do, using his inhuman, unrealistic instincts, and rose up one arm to strike down the instant he was in range of the being's head or equivalent body top. _Whatever. As long as I can kill it...._ Johnny descended with an insane prejudice, pure Madness descending.

* * *

"HRAH!!!" Mort shouted. He spun around and dodged the falling darkness, swinging his shovel in the exact arc needed to intercept Johnny's falling blade. The clash of metal sent Johnny spinning and gave Mort a chance to attack. He stepped forward and thrust his spade straight through the air. It whooshed by Johnny's face before he landed and again as he leaned back to regain his balance. Mort ducked forward and grabbed his weapon in both hands, head low and body arched over itself, delivering a hole-making digging strike that Johnny jumped away from just in time. The rain from the muddy ground followed Mort's shovel in a glistening arc.

_What absurdity now!?_ Mort exclaimed as the demonic thing flipped away and onto an obtuse protrusion of metal. The sound of metal hitting metal echoed as he landed and deafened Mort to the natural sounds of falling rain. He stepped back in a sudden fearful movement. He noticed how tense his face was from seeing this figure in his full stand. The man whipped his arms out, both holding shining daggers, and revealed **thick, black tails of a wide, black coat.** Johnny's face was shrouded in darkness. His eyes covered in blackness and his smile and mouth gone. Then the darkness of one eye parted just as his eyelid rose and his demented pupil slithered out.

"Who are you?" Johnny asked. "This shallow into Purgatory, I'd assume to find only kids. Or, are you some kind of kid-at-heart bullshit exception?"

"What?" Mort asked. "I'm a man....not from this place."

"Really?" Johnny asked, falling to the ground again. The grass swayed away from him in fearful ducks, not unlike a breeze from the power of his metal-shoes landing so hard. "How many more are you?" he asked, swaying his arms slightly as he walked Mort's way. Mort was hesitant to answer and tried to relax, but this wasn't a man he could relax around. He felt the same as when he was in prison for the first short stretch of time, always on guard, always tense, always ready to spring his wound up tension and kill a man with a single breaking snap.

"Four" Mort answered, finally straightening up. He kept Agony in his hand and faced the man with his body turned away, as if ready to move. "There are four of us that don't quite belong...not including you, it seems."

"Four?" Johnny said. "Four's too high. Four's too even. It's too unreal and predictable....let's change that. **Let's make it three!**" Johnny held up the proper new number of fingers. Mort glared and began to run away. Johnny grinned and vanished in the familiar, surrounding darkness. Mort ran under the loop of a jungle gym and then slid through a spiraling metal hole, the exit to the tunnel while Johnny ran on top and leaped out in front of Mort. The stage was suddenly set and Mort stepped up out of his slide with his shovel ready to slice. He made a powerful, hip-rotation-charged sweep and then gripped the horizontal handle and swung the shovel back with the wide blunt side swinging out.

Johnny leaned his lean body far back and dodged the shovel. It swung in its wide arc over his body. He brought his arms to his chest and crossed them in a maleficent X. The blades were held in his hands down toward his feet as he continued to fall toward a vanishing ground. Johnny kicked both his feet from the dirt below just before his back impacted, decided to defy gravity, and flipped fully over, rotating around a center away from his body and landing with his glaring, mad face and shining knives aimed at Mort's body. He came in with a hissing grunt and stabbed rapidly. Mort jumped up onto the steel cage and started hopping away while Johnny ran under him and stabbed for the soles of his feet. Mort kicked himself into a sideways flip that landed him safe onto the soft dirt.

_Where now!?_ Mort demanded. Johnny slithered out of the wide entrance to the twisting metal tunnel and came in with his wide black tail blustering in the wind. A flash of lightning blasted light through the holes in the roof, casting beams under them and blowing pillars of light all around. Thunder followed soon and covered the contact of metal on metal. Johnny's insane speed, his skinny arms holding disproportional power to their size, while Mort took his shovel by its varnished shaft and spun it around to block with the metal spade. He hopped away in retreat and stopped his shovel with contact to both Johnny's blades. Still hopping in sideways retreats, Mort took his shovel up in a sword-grip and swung. Johnny swayed away from the swing and stepped past another, calmly walking over to Mort.

"Fuck off!" Mort growled. He stabbed his spade to the ground and dug it right under Johnny's foot. Johnny looked down. He was unprepared. Mort grabbed the shovel by its horizontal grip and by the vertical shaft and gave a heaving throw of the dirt under Johnny's feet. Now the skinny man was airborne and surrounded by solid mud. He kept a hard plant on what little ground there was and brought both his metal boots together. Crouching far down he jumped and blasted the soft dirt back into mud, flying away and into the darkness. Mort last saw him slither away like a black snake into the shadows.

"What are you doing!?" Mort demanded. "You want to kill me? Fight me! I won't kill myself over here!"

"I know you won't" Johnny called through the rain and darkness. He stayed perfectly hidden despite Mort's intensive guarding motions to turn around rapidly while maintaining solid ground. "I wouldn't fight you if madness could get you so easily. In fact, in the kind of world you grew up in, you'd be dead already from the insanity."

"I don't bother with the madness of the world" Mort said, keeping his wits sharp but his guard down. "It is below me. I'd rather not wade through such endless muck of ill-raised intellect just to find a few relics of an enlightened renaissance not yet stained with shit. I'd rather make my own revolution than follow in the steps of an unlearned fool." Mort waited for a response. The rain was his only company that he could hear, but the fear of that man's presence stayed. He was around, waiting and watching, hoping to get discovered for the jolly shock Mort would be sure to display once he found him.

"A man made of himself" Johnny said. "I don't believe it. An individual in a world full of people." Mort's eyebrow cocked in curiosity. "I didn't think I was fighting a man who had actually mastered something as useful as himself."

"Well you are" Mort said. "The only thing I have yet to master that is above me is the stars themselves. After that, I'll go beyond them, above them, out of any frame of knowledge any other human could possibly understand. Is there something wrong with that at all?" Johnny walked into view, calm and neutral. For once his face held a welcoming aura. No sinister malice in his eye or any glaring madness in his mouth. He just looked.

"I'm glad I met you" Johnny said. Mort's eyes went wide and his pupils shrank. Somehow, even in the sincerity of Johnny's voice, a deep strike of fear rang true through his form. Johnny started a running dash. His face returned to that homicidal mania that came so naturally to all his muscles and he dashed forth, just above the ground were his feet, with his knife wound back to stab. Mort stopped him prematurely by simply holding up his foot. Johnny stomped his metal toes into the ground and slid to a stop just an inch from nose-to-boot contact. Mort lowered his leg with a stomp and glared Johnny down.

"Somehow" Mort said "I feel as if we've been destined to meet for a very long time...." Johnny grinned and rose his head up to angle his eyes to meet Mort's dead on. Mort sighed and lifted his arm around his head. He took down his goggles from the back of his head and moved them over his bald head and over his eyes. He looked down at Johnny and saw **silence. No wind at all.**

"Fate is a fickle thing" Johnny said. "I've certainly never met anyone who thanked fate for meeting me...."

* * *

Johnny and Mort started up a deadly fight once more. The metal of their weapons blazed around at fantastic, phantasmal speeds, creating glaring streams of light in the darkness around them. Mort locked the blades of Johnny by their hooked fangs and swung his way away from Johnny. He broke into a full retreat and fled into the darkness. Johnny regripped his daggers, twirled them around his face without a blink and dashed after Mort. Johnny's sleek, thin body sped through the darkness like a piercing bullet whereas Mort moved like a vehicle of slaughter through crowded streets, pushing through the air, against it and into it all the time. He was climbing up a structure with no earthly angles built, a twisting double-helix pattern connected by the bars of a jungle gym, but gravity ruled and Mort's feet still dragged him to the ground as he climbed and ran on top of the spiraling draconian structure.

"**WHEEE!!!**" Johnny screeched. Mort turned back and saw the creepy killer rushing up along the bars of the helix. Mort stopped his flight and brought Agony up to guard. Johnny spun with each slash, once, halfway around for each attack he made. "I love an ironic death!"

"How is this ironic?" Mort asked. Johnny took a blank face to think as he spun and slashed, driving Mort further and further along the quickly vertical-sweeping structure.

"It's kind of an esoteric thing I have" Johnny said. "I mean, think about it, praising you once for being beyond a simple human, and now we're fighting on a DNA model. I thought it was ironic."

"That was _too_ esoteric!" Mort chided. He swung hard and pushed himself forward, reversing the energy as he hacked and chopped his shovel like a powerful short-bladed ax with which he wished to dismember Johnny with. He swung for his pencil neck and his anorexic stomach, hitting nothing but air as lithe Johnny swayed and slithered away from each attack as it came. Mort made on final swing and reached his free hand up to his back. He stepped in and brought out the Spade of Fate, now wielding to Johnny's par as he forced the skinny man to back-flip his way along the bars to the ground where he landed and leaped away. Mort jumped straight down to the ground, landing with the force of a brick and the wild growl of a bear, then gave chase.

_The offensive is mine now!_ Mort exclaimed in thought. _With two weapons like this, I don't have a choice but to be aggressive. It's too hard to defend him even with one shovel so long as he's wielding those quick daggers...._ Mort charged constantly at Johnny. Tired of running blind Johnny turned around and began a frivolous passing through the many obstacles in his course. Mort continued his chase over and around the constructs that Johnny slithered through so effortlessly, stopping with a slid in the scattered cedar chips of the playground to compose himself. Johnny looked back, losing Mort in the darkness, keeping the last image of the frantic man looking about in a hasty panic.

_He's taking this seriously_ Johnny thought. He raced up the steep steps of a climbing object and poised himself as a gargoyle at the very top, his legs bent deep while his hand stroked his chin in deep thought. _He's obviously not a guy I can just kill. Well, there's no one that can't just die, but all I'm doing at present is waiting on him to die. I'm inputting little effort myself to get him dead. I need to reapply my pressure and start planning around him......Nah, I'm no fighter. I just kill people._ Johnny stood tall and looked around. Pillars of light hit the ground and shook the tall metal mountain of twisted, nightmarish metal pieces and plastic flooring that Johnny throned himself upon. He saw, for but a brief moment, a field nearly endless and covered in this rusted jungle of metal and cheap plastics. What he didn't see was Mort.

_And now he's gone_ Johnny realized. _Shit. I need to pay more attention. It's not often I get into fights......_ Johnny started scanning his environment closely. The rain was coming down just as hard, and now that the clashing of metal wasn't dulling and occupying all his hearing he could sense the rain falling down in thick, wet puddles. _Ahhh_ he sighed silently, _what a pleasant rain. This is the kind of rain that people walk in and forget their troubles. They just leave it in the street for good men like me to take in and get sick off of. Rain like this..._ Johnny stopped thinking for a second. He abandoned his mind to a higher animal within him and he quickly scaled down the metal construct in a series of swift hops and jumps, landing crouched low to the ground with his knives pointed out in preparation to fight.

"Shit" Johnny said, rising up with a slide. "Thought I heard something...." Mort descended from above. His heavy feet fell silently on the plastic floor of the demonic jungle gym. His shovels were wound up, both arms across his chest and spades sharply bladed. Johnny began to turn around with one eye wide and a smile creeping up his face. Time slowed down to the point where one could even follow the path of the lightning in the sky as the pillars of light descended like grand curtains from up above.

"**FOUND YOU, FUCKER!!!"** Johnny shouted, breaking the lag in time with a sudden jerk of his head and a maniacal warping of his face. His teeth grinned up past his ears and his lips curled at impossible angles. His eyes were black with white pupils now. Insanity powered him, like fuel through the valves and tubes of his thin arms, cranking out pure madness and power through the thrusting pistons deep in his body. Mort was astounded with his demonic speed as Johnny jumped up to intercept Mort, meeting the lag of time as he entered the same air, both knives brandished.

Things stopped for a while. Mort lost himself in the freezing of time and simply stared with his wide-eyes hidden behind the black goggles. Johnny let all his madness shine out through his eyes of negative color and his seething smile that reached across his devious face. A grand echoing of time seemed to pass as the two stood opposite each other in a negligible time and space. Mort had his legs tucked up and his knees forward from the jump. Johnny was thin as a javelin that flew through the air with extreme murderous prejudice. Prejudice against that which was in his way.

_Perhaps_ Mort thought in the passage of frozen time, _sneaking up on this man was not the brightest strategy I've come up with...._

Time flowed normally once more. The sound of metal clashing muted the roar of lightning and thunder and was added by the grand ground-ripping sliding of Mort's heavy boots against the muddy ground. He slid past and under yet another construct, nearly slowed to a stop when he jerked his legs around with a swift push of his arm against the air to look at where he had been and where he hoped Johnny was. Indeed, that demon of madness hadn't moved far. He held his blades at his back, one over his shoulder and the other wrapping around his side under his arm. The wind roared and blew the tail of his coat up like a single, flickering wing of black fire, extending out like the wing of Judgment itself. Mort couldn't help but be in awe.

"This day" Johnny said, keeping his pose steady, one eye normal and glaring while the other stayed bugged and insane with inversion, "is going to drag itself on forever, isn't it?" All the battle long Johnny's conscience had kept up with him, and now she sat in an elegant, long gown along a **vertical column of metal, still smoking her cigarette.**

"At least you're still alive" She said. Johnny slowly drew his blades back to a neutral position and let the wind die his dramatic charisma down.

"At least?" Johnny said. He looked over his shoulder, spotting no Mort, then turned with a sigh back to the empty reach of darkness before him. "Well, at least I'm not bored...." Johnny arms rose on their own and he struck an unfitting pose. **A holy, martyr pose as he fell backwards and landed to the ground on his feet, back in the darkness.**

**Ready for more...**


	71. An Unfair Disadvantage

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Sam sprinted through the halls. His arms pumped pure rage and violence into his legs that powered him forward. His face was blank, murderous, and his suit dripped with the same intent of villainy that poured out of his soul. He had the steely nerve to murder and kill and rip and rend and masticate and generally fuck up the next thing moving and at least imitating life that came into his godless line of sight. He wrung his fingers with tight clenches and flexes of his arms as he ran, never breathless and always staying fast.

_How big is this fucking place!?_ He thought, still unaware of his place. Sam continued running so far that he lost his mind and purpose in running and was now so totally lost that even the walls weren't moving anymore. No lines of demonic communication swaying like waves on the crayola-clue plaster behind the lockers. Naturally, the intelligent soldier in Sam prepared himself for the worst and found an area between the lockers, a bare area of wall, and pressed up against it.

_If they can't jump from the brush_ he thought _they'll hide in the mud. They'll hid in the branches of trees. They'll hide under rocks and inside refrigerators, stealing my sammiches! These are enemies no different then the one I've fought before. They ambush relentlessly. It's their only form of offense...._ Or so Sam thought. He looked across the hall, to a wider area where there were no lockers, and saw a door. He hadn't noticed that door before. Either that or it wasn't there. He squinted his eyes and lowered his shades just enough to move his sight from behind them up to the window, unable to peer through any further. His vision was now limited as there was no sky for him to peer through endlessly, but reconnaissance was still possible at a limited level for him. Inside the room he saw broken desks covered with a contagion rot and fungal growth, some nasty deep-green that seemed to sway freely in the air, as if feeling for some source of food that hovered around.

_Shit. I forgot about rooms. They could be hiding, or scouting, through those!_ Although Sam thought as such, he made the brash move across the hall, staying low, to open the door to the room and peek in physically rather than trust his now limited astral plane of vision. He pulled out one of his regular 9mm pistols for insurance and checked it before entering the room. He stepped carefully. **The fungus was everywhere.** The room was damp and cold, stagnant from an uncountable length of time where it had been forgotten. He stepped lightly between the patches of living, swaying rot, seeing his motions echo through the cold air and twitch the feeler growths of each sickening green patch. He saw mounds of horridly rotted debris, some of which had the faded color of something that was once living, all muted by the room's natural deep-blue darkness. The mounds grew in all places, on the floor, from under the tiles like tumors of the foundation and on the ceiling where the fleshy holes would pulse as if trying to breath.

A powerful gust of energy swept through the room, carrying Sam's body to spin around toward the door. An arcane notion to retreat filled him, some dangerous instinct to quickly leave the room flooded his mind and he was compelled to follow it and walked towards the door, making leaps through the thick air and paddles of his arms as he swam for the door which slowly swung shut. Bubbles obscured his view. Bubbles? What the fuck? Sam finally realized all that he had overlooked. The algae, the barnacles, the choral formations: **this room was underwater and had been for ages...**

Now he felt stupid as he held his breath and swam to the door. It sealed shut with a deep muted click, leaving Sam with a single option. He aimed his gun and attempted to fire at the glass window of the door. However, his gun was flooded from chamber to trigger, barrel to hammer and back, and already the microscopic life that dominated this bizarre oceanic scene had crusted itself over and possessed his gun. Sam threw it away and tightened his suit up to prevent it from further damaging his weaponry, all in the hope of the window still being breakable.

"_You can't chalk anything up to logic here"_ a voice said, childish and astute. Sam swam to the window and peered out with utter shock. Standing in the hall was that child, with his pin-striped vest and pants and shiny shoes, his head and eyes round and his smile devious and steel-colored. _"This is the place where those who stay attached to their worldly common sense get lost! You can't let yourself be held back by common sense here, mister!"_ The child seemed to vanish as Sam leaked more air into streaming, climbing bubbles before his eyes. Sam felt like cursing, but obviously the limits of the room forbade him from even inhaling anymore. He was trapped. The knob of the door was no more, and already a crust of deep-sea disgust had covered the door and began to breathe. Sam looked around. He was positive that something would work to his advantage.

The windows were still there, he noticed, and outside them in the darkness he saw a bright flash of lightning. The storm of reality was still raging outside, a perpetual fall of rain down from the black sky of infinite Limbo. Sam had a chance, though the repercussions of taking that chance were still far above his understanding. He only knew that the chance existed and that with it he may live, and that was as good as he could get it. He took a pause of reflection and silently prayed as he reached for his Holy relic of obliteration.

_Guide this bullet_ he prayed _to set my free. Let this bullet be my angel, my lift from hell to heaven, my guiding light and a silver wind 'neath my wings. I pray, Merciful Universe, guide this bullet true!_ Sam drew his gun out so quickly that the air of royalty it exuded carved a breathable path or wind through the water in the form of a long, thick bubble. Then he fired. The room exploded first with a tremendous shock-wave of water, exploding out around Sam and forcing him back against the steadfast door. The bullet had blown not just the window but most of the wall around it out of existence and into the distance as glimmering, dusty shrapnel. The water blasted out with amazing force, exploding out at first, then pouring out and carrying with it all the aggregated oceanic life and unlife that had gathered in the stagnancy of the eternal room's condition. In the end Sam was left to wade breathlessly in waist-deep water.

"That" he said between pants "was bullshit. I hope I die before I have to endure that shit-cock mother-fucking shit again! Good god!" Sam held his face and staggered to the side of the hole he made. He could hear the rumbling of thunder and the crackles of thunder along with the hissing roar of rain that chanted now in the shallow puddle that was left of the room's pond as the drops came pouring in to overflow the water level even more. Sam waded over to the open hole in the wall and leaned out with his jaw tightly clenched in anger. He rose his head up to the sky and flipped off the clouds, proclaiming long and loud

"**FUCK YOU, RAAAAAAAIIIIIINNNNN!!!!!**" Internally, he held no direct detest for the rain, but if it never rained an ocean would not exist, and by distant extension that room would never have existed either, and he felt good blaming something if for no other reason than to make himself smile....

* * *

After trudging through a surrealist hell of hallways for so long, Yvonne and Tom took a break in a small classroom that emitted a violet glow. No children were there and the walls were bare of their transportation lines. It seemed safe, and in its safety they rested, watching the colorful, playful shadow puppets of a loaded slide-projector as they circled around the room. Yvonne held Tom in the corner furthest from the door, arms overlapping his unsteady pulsing chest and his head rested on her breasts. A very childlike, appropriately male posture for a man as injured as him. Tom occasionally groaned and rubbed his eyes, like a sleepless child, and Yvonne smiled at him.

"You know what?" Yvonne began.

"Hmm?" Tom grunted in response.

"Remember what you tried to pull on me" she began "the first time we met in this game?"

"I swung a bunt" he began "and ran for second. How'd that end for me again?"

"You were tackled" Yvonne said "by the pitcher, the first-baseman, all the outfielders and the umpire at once."

"That doesn't make sense" he said. Yvonne giggled.

"Failure that epic doesn't need reason" she said. Tom nodded in agreement and finally opened his eyes, musing at the deep violet of the ceiling. These tiles looked straight, but lined against his squinting eyelids he saw the gradient change as they all converged and multiplied on the horizon of the far side of the room. An optical illusion, masterfully crafted, to make the ceiling look impossibly wide and concave.

"I understand now" Tom said, catching her attention away from the hypnotic ceiling. "I understand a lot more about myself than I used to. All this killing, all these fights, all the death and dying and the mysteries of the universe, through it all I've come to an understanding of myself."

"And what is that?" Yvonne asked.

"It's just that" Tom said. "I understand myself, my workings, my disillusions, my fears, my hatred, and where it all comes from, and I think it all started when you rejected me that I started to look inward."

"Not to be a bitch for asking" Yvonne began "but surely I wasn't the first girl to reject you."

"No" Tom said. "You and I had the most similarities on a subconscious level, I thought, but I decided that was bullshit. I thought we had the most similarity in our profession since you kill people and I kill people, but in the end you're royalty and I'm just a gamer. So I kept thinking and thinking, and I realized there was only one real area where you and I had any compatibility."

"What?" Yvonne asked.

"**Our insecurities**" Tom said. Yvonne furrowed her brow at him. The room's light seemed to deepen without losing its hue. It got much more pronounced as a penetrating, illuminating shade of purple and covered them both like a velvet blanket, holding them down and keeping them warm. Now the shadows that crept across the wall, happy turtles and squids and bees and monkeys, they all looked a little bit darker, less vivid, more like they were parts of the wall.

"What insecurities?" Yvonne asked. Tom gave a weak, tired chuckle.

"Do you know how ironic that statement was?" he asked. Yvonne picked up on it a second late and only suffered herself to frown instead of laugh for her own unintentional idiocy. "We're both humans. I guess that's the broadest way of justifying how close we could have been, but still I felt that there was something that kept us apart, a disconnect apart from our social status or our preference for mates. Maybe it was something completely over my head, but our deepest fear of each other seemed to hold me back from acting properly."

"How do you mean proper, exactly?" she asked.

"I mean" he said "I wouldn't have acted like a douche to you if I could have seen it before. I would just treat you like a team-mate instead of a piece of meat, so to speak."

"I guess" she added "if you're right about all this, it wouldn't have mattered to me. I would have treated you all like shit no matter what you guys did for me, because in the end I'd just want to win and do better than all of you. I might have tried to take you on if you got in my way, too. I'm just that kind of girl....a bitch."

"And I'm a loser dick" Tom added. "If there were anything I could have done in my life, meaningless as it was, to keep myself from becoming like this, I would have done it."

"Hold on" Yvonne said, "how is your life pointless exactly? Doesn't this conversation have any meaning to you?"

"Not anymore" Tom said. "I can't wretch up a reason to be alive anymore, knowing the truth about myself......"

"What truth?" Yvonne demanded. "Fuck the truth. Just deny it and be happy with yourself! Hell, if I can do it you can to!"

"What truth do you deny?" Tom asked. And then Yvonne froze. She had no idea why she had said that. There were no real images that came to mind to illustrate any real truths that she had hidden from herself. She acknowledged her promiscuity, her flippant and disrespectful attitude, her blatant harshness with others she sees in a lower light; there was nothing for her to admit that she didn't already embrace. But still the feeling overpowered her. She couldn't shake that she was still hiding from herself a greater, invisible monster of truth, and that's when if all seemed to happen. The shadow puppets from the slides changed shape. They sounded off with loud clicks and flashes as the light of the room went from violet to a softer indigo and faces on masks started streaming across the walls. Happy faces and sad faces, curious and painful and everything possible in only twenty-two slides.

The room changed to blue and shadow-puppet sex-positions started sliding across the walls. Green showed dark lumps and connecting tubes and valves that upon closer inspection were organs. Yellow brought forth the outlines of murdered bodies with holes to show the damage and the dead looks of their eyes. Orange showed dancing children and their demonic grins, and the duo panicked to their feet, thinking that they were the real danger, almost spraying fire into the walls.

"Wait for it" Tom said. "Red's gonna be something....bad." Yvonne swallowed her fear. The slides made half their normal click and the room fell dark. Yvonne moved close to Tom, her reactive claustrophobia taking hold, and he grabbed her with an arm around her back. "Calm down....Just stay calm...." Yvonne nodded, her head in his chest, and heard the click. Now the room was red. The shadows were static, on huge one on each wall. Yvonne opened her eyes and beheld a ghastly recalling of unknown images.

A man amidst a pile of bodies sneering evilly in her direction. A strong, naked man writhing in pleasure atop a faceless female body that seemed to shine in the darkness with a supra-ecstatic quality. The image casting of a group of men gathered around the body of a young woman bound in a chair, multiple monitors over her head displaying repeats of both of the other images closed in on certain points. Closeups of the decapitated head held in the manic man's hand, his blade, his sneer, the bodies around him, the point of connection between man and woman, the psychotic qualities of his face, the droning, cosmic pleasure of hers, and all these squares of imagery were somehow extended from the girl's head. Yvonne then turned around to the back most wall and saw the final image. This image, through some vague trickery of light and mirror manipulation, was in all seven basic colors and used them well, all of them coming together to form a prismatic collaboration of white at the face.

**And it was her. A mirror-image of Yvonne in her most gallant, showy, regal dress with a bloody yellow bat in hand and the haughtiest, most seductive look of malice in her eye.** That's when the truth came full force. The truth of the images and the context hidden by the shadows they were displayed upon. Her memories were unlocked and flooded into her head. She fell to her knees, her body reeling, her balance lost and the ceiling playing tricks with her eyes. She threw her head forward and vomited on the floor. Tom moved away and watched her wretch, unable to move at the simultaneous revelation of what he saw, and Yvonne screamed.

"_**!!!!!!!!"

* * *

The playground atrium was abuzz with frightening sensations. The very air shook at the horrible meshing of cosmic darkness that resonated from two men who currently took to leaping about over the nightmarish, twisted metal and plastic constructs of immaturity with incalculable murderous intent. Mort went dashing and climbing in great, wide strides over the the arcs and steps of the cataclysmal torn and twisted jungle gyms while Johnny simple flit and flew away. One slash beget another of his mighty spades as he swung them both through the air before him, reaching for the retreating, slender frame of Johnny as he hopped and dashed and ran away constantly. He and Mort met solid earthen ground in entered a long dashing chase.**_

"Come on, damn you!" Mort called as he skid to a stop, his spade under his boot and digging up a trench of dirt and grass. Johnny slowed himself with a circular peddle of his feet backwards and managed to stop with his knives both ready. "Fight me!" Mort demanded. Johnny leaned in. Mort rose his shovel from the ground with a huge mound of dirt following him. He thought he had accidentally dug up some long, interwoven plant root, as it was white and pale and limply hanging between the saturated clumps of dirt and worms that his shovel dug up. Johnny shied away almost instantly, allowing the dirt to all fall from Mort's shovel and reveal **the skeleton he had brought up, the tip of the spade pierced through the back of it's skull.**

_What remarkable serendipity_ Mort thought. Johnny used the distraction to his advantage and fled once more into the darkness. Mort reeled his shovel back, the skeleton still all in one piece and stuck to his spade, and prepared a catapult throw from over his head. He listened to the splashing of the rain for where it was uneven in the darkness and watched the winds of fate spin and spiral madly around themselves.

"THERE!" Mort shouted. He tossed the skeleton into the blind darkness and ran after it, sheathing Agony at his back and carrying the Spade of Fate like a mighty battle-ax into battle. Johnny hid underneath a plate of metal that was the side of some greater, unknown structure used for frivolity and play in an ideal setting and heard a loud thud just overhead. A bone arm dropped down and dangled in his view, swinging back and forth, as if waving to him. Johnny grinned and waved back, then froze and shrunk back into the caving darkness, his eyes dimming out in the distance, as the heavy footfalls of Mort approached.

"Where are you!?" Mort demanded. "Where have you gone!?" Mort turned around as he walked, pacing and breathing in equally frenetic, and he saw the skeleton marker. "You're there, aren't you!? Aren't you!?" Mort crouched down and looked into the dark chasm. There was no Johnny. The winds of fate stirred with to much life for such a beast as he to be there, but they were moved and swirling around themselves like he had been there. Mort stood up with his teeth grit and lowed with menace, turning his back to nothing that didn't make a sound. _This man is an anomoly, more so than I had anticipated. Where all things I've encountered so far held some shred of fate to linger about them, some feint trace of the cosmic winds of destiny, **he has none.** He is a being devoid of any destined path. What kind of terrible power does he hold to defy the entire universe!?_ Something creaked. Mort spun around with a deadly glare and saw the dark figure dashing his way. Johnny leaped into the air and came down to stab the ground. Mort rolled away and recovered just in time to strike the dirt from Johnny's blades.

They continued to fight in a beastly fashion, but with the style of Shaolin masters, expertly dodging their fatal blows and blocking the unavoidable power-through blasts. Mort swung his spade into Johnny's blades and carried Johnny in a half revolution over the ground before Johnny managed to break away and spin off in a dodge. Mort swung his shovel in his arm, keeping them straight and together as a single entity and extension, spinning his whole, thick body around his muscularly angled waist before stopped abruptly to glare the tip down at Johnny. Johnny sneered, drew his arms together in an X and dashed in with a scissor-slash at Mort's weapon hilt. Mort drew it back and then flicked it out. Johnny jumped back. Holding it in two hands again, Mort spun around and smashed his weapon deep into the ground.

"**RAAAAAAHHH!!!!"** Some terrible force took over Mort. Without defense he charged forward and plowed his forearm into Johnny's stomach, reeling the slender man with pain. He continued his charge and stopped suddenly, jutting his arm forward with the mechanical strength of a piston, then whipped his shovel through the ground at his side and up in a crescent arc of shining mud and dirt in the air. Johnny managed to block that and was sent not only up but far and fast away. Mort took a moment, leaning over himself with his weapon in both hands, to breathe deeply and recover his stamina.

"That was fucking cool" Johnny said as he drifted through the air. He landed in a deep crouch, his legs jarred and suddenly locked, and he slowly rose with a groan of his joints and his knives both aimed at Mort's heart through the thick darkness with his arms both crossed over his torso. His left hand crossed to his right shoulder and his right hand stopped past his thin stomach, his knives both held underhanded. He was smiling so brightly that Mort could see him like a demonic star in the sky. Then the columns of light blasted down, one cast directly over Johnny and his twisted pile of junk that he stood upon. Mort saw, in the flash of instance, Johnny leap away, to the left, and he gave chase.

"This rush is fantastic!" Nny exclaimed. "I can't get over it! This is so fucking amazing! This incredible surging of energy and adrenaline and testosterone within me. I can't feel any possible end to the euphoria that this fight is bringing me! I don't want it to end!"

"But don't you want to kill?" his conscience asked, floating through the air in an elegantly seated pose, still smoking from her holder stick.

"Fuck that!" Nny said. He fell down to the ground and stopped himself after a short step, keeping his toes to the ground and his arms heavy at his sides. "I haven't felt this in a long-ass time! I can barely remember the last time my life had such an incidental meaning! I love it!!!"

"You do?" his conscience asked. "I thought you got me because you got rid of _all_ of your want and survived off of _need_ for so long that you manifested me to represent your fleeting desire to **want again.**"

"Maybe" Nny admitted. "I don't know. Fuck if I remember. That was too long ago for me to care at all....." Now Nny stood in a misty haze of lingering rain on a patch of muddy ground. His goat-toed metal boots sloshed through the muck as he moved so slowly and carefully across the ground. He spun his knives in his hands, twirling his fingers as the handles spun the blades round and round like radiant, silver glares of light shining off his fingers. "I just can't wait for the next attack to come. I want to keep fighting. I want to keep moving. Goddammit, the want in me is going **critical!!!**" Just then the rain seemed to stop. The former dull roaring of rushing water from far above and the regular blasts of lightning were gone. Only the lows of distant thunder remained from the dying storm.

_**Vrrrrnnnn...**_

"What the fuck?" Nny exclaimed.

_**VRRRRRNNNNnnnnnnn......**_

"What....the.....fook?" he said with a tilt to his neck and a squint in his eyes. Through the darkness the loud noise came, building up more and more like the growling of a monster just waking to hunt its prey. Johnny was taken aback by the flash of flames and the hiss of a grinding gyro that started up the most terrible engine in all existence, installed into the most murderous weapon the human race has since wielded.

"Come on, motherfucker!" Mort said. He gave a mighty yank of the chord, holding the saw down under his foot and extending his arm up with the rise of his whole body. Then it snapped back into place and the ground and air shook in fear at the sound of his terrible new weapon. The perpetual motion engine let out a deafening roar and a glowing sphere of light that stole from the darkness. The **Gore,** named for a misguided mind of a man destined for greatness, now wielded against the greatest by a man driven by fate. A long, loud, demonically archaic chainsaw paneled with wood and assembled with a mystic iron that shone in a glowing orange. Mort could barely hear himself over the godless machine's idle growling, but Nny could hear and see it from the great distance away.

"He's got a chainsaw" Nny said, pointing childishly.

"How unfair" she said, pulling herself from the scene in a puff of darkness.

"I know" Nny agreed. "If we're fighting like that shouldn't I get a weed-whacker or a hedge-trimmer? This seems a bit unfair!" Unfair though it was, Mort charged forward and hacked and cut and slashed his way through the solid metal and plastic scenery with the infinite motion of the razor-sharpened, venerable chain sawing through all matter like flimsy paper.

"**HAAAAAAHHH!!!!"** Mort roared. The chainsaw was just above him in pitch, roaring like a dragon, like a devil, like a God casting merciless rage down upon the denizens of his kingdom....


	72. The Inequality Rises

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Fresh and soggy from his latest annoying ordeal, Sam stalked through the halls with his shoulders forward, a stomp of anger in each step, and his mighty gun of total Fuck swinging his hand back and forth. His glasses emitted a menacing glare and the living lines of the violet-tinted walls ran away from him in snaking wiggles. He paid them no mind. His only goal was somewhere far ahead, somewhere he couldn't see. Somewhere lurking in the mad darkness of Purgatory. That child. With those **eyes.**

"I'll kill him" Sam said "and skull-fuck him! With my **gun!**" The blessed thing rattled as he threw his arm up in a wide swing to arc his step a bit further. He didn't feel like walking anymore, but running was baseless as a strategy, so he kept himself slow. The monsters were already afraid of him, but he was still being followed and he knew by who. Their synchronized steps and haughty walk far behind him made it obvious. He felt the temptation to turn and fire, but fought it back. He could lose them easily. They were just bitches, after all. Sam suddenly sprinted forward and turned a corner.

"After him!" a cheerleader shouted. A group of four busty demons in harlot uniforms began their wind sprint in Sam's direction, chasing him as far as they could, turning the same corner and running even further. Sam coolly waited inside a locker and silently exited to watch the three of them run down an endless hall. He kept staring them down, just to ensure his victory, and nearly turned around when a piercing whistle blew at him. One cheerleader was behind him, acting as a sentinel for the others who screeched to a stop and changed course. Sam forced his open palm to her mouth and thrust her whistle into her throat. He then watched her choke, determined the exact position of the obstruction, and kicked her throat to hit the whistle and pierced a bleeding wound in her throat.

She struggled and croaked with gurgled gasps as Sam heel-toed the hell away, down the hall once more. The other three came to their fallen comrade, reaching, praying for humanity and for pity, but got the same treatment as all in the realm of hungry ghosts. Demonic fangs gnashed and Stygian maws growled as the three busty beasts ate their comrade, pulling her apart in splatters of gore and fleshy flare. They rose up with vain brushes of their hair and poses of their slender, feminine legs, then turned Sam's way and grinned. Demonic, glaring fangs lined their lips and they ran with random cartwheels and fore-flips after the fleeing man.

Sam found himself running down a long, narrow, straight corridor. No doors or windows, just lockers and straight, endless tiles warped and paneled on wiggling lines from the arcane sorcery of this strange dimension, the horizon stretching out to the bordering walls of violet haze. Sam panted and breathed cold vapor that swirled into the shapes of skulls. Everything around him was out to fuck him over, he knew, but he was too engrossed in his task of full retreat to care entirely. He just ran, knowing that the child he sought would cross his path again.

Suddenly, time skipped and lagged. Sam felt his body running through a thick perversion of time and space. Everything around him seemed to move fine but his body barely passed through the air in its normal movements. He saw the air even swirl slower and slower, and knew by instinct that his pursuers were following him at the same slowed rate.

_What the hell?_ Sam thought, surprised to hear his inner voice hadn't slowed at all. _Some kind of stasis? Don't tell me I'm up against someone who can do this?_

"Not quite!" the kid chided. He walked past Sam at a regular pace, heel-toe, heel-toe, wagging his finger with his steel-mouthed grin. "I can do a lot worse things than this, **Sam!**" Internally, Sam cringed. He knew the demon child could feel that cringe, and he tried his best to move his eyes inside his slowed skull. They worked just fine, and a moment later he found that while all time around him had stopped and the air no longer moved, he could still talk normally.

"Who are you?" Sam demanded. "I'll shoot you if you don't answer me!"

"Hahaha!" the child laughed, turning with a tilt of his big head. "**HOW!?**" he roared. His voice was doubled over in a chorus of demonic echoes. A blast of wind blew past frozen Sam and brushed back his hair. The spectral wind rippled and wavered, moving and colliding, folding over itself and crashing together with thunderous roars, until its torrential force was strong enough to shatter the bodies of the cheerleaders down the hall. Then all was calm. The grin was back, smug and wide, and the static stand-off ensued. The child grinned up at Sam while Sam stayed frozen in time.

"....little fucker" Sam cursed.

"You should watch yourself" the kid said, taking a hand from behind his back. He held it out to the side, ready to snap his fingers with the flick of his wrist. "You're not exactly in college yet! People can still get in trouble for swearing around here." His huge eyes moved slowly to the side, following an invisible pendulum ticking before him. "Which way will you go? If you were a stick that fell over, which way would you fall? Only so many ways to go, you know, but you'll never get any chance but one! Can you decide or will the wind force you down? Can you take the fall? Can you survive the turns of fate? How hard can you spin it?"

"Spin what?" Sam asked.

"The Wheel" the child answered, centering his saucer eyes once more. "**Of Fortune!**" He snapped his fingers. Sam stepped forward. He was taken far aback into a foreign frame of innocence in his mind. He didn't recognize this feeling, but he felt like an excited child, jumping and clicking his heels with glee, for **the circus was all around him.**

"Oh, not this shit again" Sam groaned. He felt defeated, betrayed and furious. He brushed his hair and let it flip over his brow in its lengthy strings. "I'm starting to hate this game...." A carnival of sight and sense was all around him. He was in the center stage of some dramatic act, a ring of reinforcement around him to keep him in place. All along the striped cloth walls and all across the rows of chairs with folding seats, bright orbs of color were hovering smoothly around. Spotlights from some unseen tower that spun them hither and thither, lighting the large room with perverse colors while filling it with darkness at the same time.

The mood was festive and the air stank of celebration. Streamers were visible on the ground around Sam. Confetti cannons were loaded at the corners of his ring. Sam looked around, in all the directions he could, and discovered where he was just as the house lights came on, illuminating the whole room with natural sunny yellow.

It was an auditorium, a stage, with striped yellow and red curtains pulled to the side and backstage properly behind Sam. A shuffle of feet alerted the soldier to turn quickly and aim his gun. Then the building applause of an audience struck his ears and he turned. He saw nothing in the seats but mist, visible vapor in the air without form or order at all. Sam was overcome with confusion, and his excitement was realized anew. He was the lead of the stage, the lead actor for the school. Behind him, wearing masks over their skull faces, were the school's ballerinas.

The traditional faces of theater hung high overhead. Comedy stretching its iron frame with laughter and Tragedy bearing its fangs of evil down upon the mist of the audience. Sam knew where he was, who he was with, and what had happened....roughly. The Drama troupe, no less. He was amidst demonic actors and frivolous monologuers. Demons who had memorized Shakespeare and Orwell and all the other amazing playwrights, as well as the indies of their locale who had written in the past for this horrific stage. From the curtain two men in opposing garb with puffed shoulders and hats and pants, wearing tights all elsewhere, came prancing in with skulls with fresh, unrended skin still hanging from them. They both had skull faces, naturally blood red with exposed teeth and holes for eyes.

"Alas, Yorick!" the one in red bellowed. "I knew him, Horatio!"

"To die!" the one in blue proclaimed. "To sleep! To live, no more!"

_Fuck_ Sam thought. _Fucking kill me......

* * *

Yvonne had her arms around herself, rocking slightly in a sickly dizzy motion in the middle of the hall. The floor she and Tom were on had a deep red hue in the air. Everything nauseated them. Just the depth of the color was enough to flood their sight and cause a spinning sensation in the backs of their heads. Tom did the smart thing an equipped monochromatic shades, giving everything that moved a thick shimmering outline, casting his world in gray. Yvonne was mad with fear and just rocked, back and forth, arms across her chest, breathing shakily._

"Come on" Tom said. "Get up." He was cold in his demand. Yvonne didn't move aside from her regular rocking. Tom was standing guard and getting plenty annoyed with it. The walls were moving, not that it was unusual at this point, but the creatures within only stalked and scouted. None made the motion to attack. Tom could see them through his tinted goggles. They turned their better-drawn faces, better compared to the elementary kids that is, and just glared at him before continuing on their way to better things.

Better than killing? Tom was on edge. He knew the forces were gathering their power somewhere far off and away from his killing intent. What made his nerves rigid as rust was the collapsed heap of human that was Yvonne still rocking and muttering in a Slavic tongue to herself.

"We need to move!" Tom exclaimed. "God knows, those freaks could be coming at this second to kill us both! You want to get raped again!?"

"**AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!"** she screamed. Tom jumped away. Her shriek was powerful. He even felt his bones start to melt away and his pants tighten at her gasping moans of horror that followed. He found his body in an odd state of affairs. All at once his muscles had relaxed and his bones had softened. He fell limp, all his rigidity draining down to a single place at thigh level. Yvonne looked up, saw the tower of destruction, and fled with a crawl to the wall where she hit her head and slid to the floor, clawing her nails into the paint to try and stay up.

"No more......" she whispered in desperation. "I want to go home....! I don't want this......!" Tom got up and palmed at his groin. Once Yvonne was settled back on depression his body returned to its normal state of alertness and inertness on its separate respective levels. He shot to his feet and sprang over in a swift hop to Yvonne's side. She was muttering again in a language he didn't understand. He opened his mouth but kept silent. Yvonne brought her head up with a hand covering her tearing eyes and moved it forward to touch the lump in the wall. Tom grabbed her by the wrist and threw her across the hall where she rolled up onto her shoulder blades and then back down to her butt.

Tom was deep in struggle with a terrifying entity from within the wall, a gluttonously fat glob of flesh molded together with mouths and hands and stray nails oozing down the grotesque living pile while all orifices screamed. It threw sticky globules of flesh at Tom and he pulled away, trying to fight it off, but it was everywhere. Like a flood of flesh-colored tar it stuck to him and pulled him in. Tom's slender frame was no match for it. He was being pulled in, osmosed right into the beast's infinite belly.

"Yvonne!!" Tom shouted. "TAG OUT!!!" He reached out for her and called her with numb roars. Yvonne was stunned and thoughtless. She only sat and watched the hideous display carry on, watched the flesh ooze down like wet, corroded clay, watch the lines on the wall dance and pulsate, watch Tom get sucked away head first....watched the world of her roll by.

All the innocence she thought she had killed was already dead, and only now did she find herself naked atop the summit of a hill of bodies, pointlessly bashing them with a bat. She saw herself so worked over that no part of her body was without scars or damage. She thought she was flawless before, but this rotted corrosion of her soul made her see what she truly saw in the mirror. Her mind and soul were tarnished. It wasn't the loss of her innocence that bothered her. She lost it willingly at first. But losing it unwillingly was starting to drive her mad.

_This is crazy_ she thought. _All this time, all the stories I'd ever heard were wrong. I never knew who I was. I just thought I was naturally a Duchess! I had no idea about myself before then, the terrible past that led to this present....and what will happen to my future? Do I dare consider reawakening the beast that I was? That sex-crazed maniac? That libido with a body? What other secrets did I seal away? What else has my mind done to me that I don't know!?_ And while she pondered this with a battle of internal conflict, her body had sprung to life and was beating the fat away mercilessly with her bat. Splashes of flesh broke apart from the glob and Tom was soon free to assist, firing his gun into the beast's bizarre frame.

"**FUCK! FUCKING DIE! FUCKING CHEEEESE!!!!**" Yvonne growled. The animosity and rage in her voice made Tom take notice, particularly to the cheese part. Finally, with a deathly groan, the glob of beast died, hardened and decayed in a melting pool of plastic color. Yvonne panted and dropped her bat, then went down to her hands and knees and started shaking her head.

"Uhhh" Tom groaned. All he could do was watch on in terror as Yvonne became a demon from a poor Japanese horror flick. Her dirt-blonde streaks flew every way like streamers and her natural Slovak brown began to shine through. She turned her head and set her sight on Tom. Her eyes were wide and her teeth were showing in a mad sneer. ".....Stay down, Yvonne" Tom pleaded. "Down....down...." Yvonne didn't listen. The beast within her woke itself up and sprang on him, pinning him down, straddling and grinding into his lap with maniacal laughter.

"I wanna fuck!" she growled. "I wanna FUCK! GAAAHHH!!!!"

_She's lost her mind!_ Tom realized. _This is going every single way I never wanted it to go....maybe. Rape is kinda hot._ Yvonne started growling with a more voracious tone and grabbed the skintight fabric at his chest. She was ready to rip it all apart when she seemed to awaken once more and blink herself sane.

"Yvonne?" Tom asked. "Is that you? Are you back?"

"......You know" Yvonne began, sliding back onto the floor and curling herself up in a ball of pity, "I just realized something...."

"What?" Tom asked, eager to hear her sanity prove itself.

"I have a lot of blocked memories...." Yvonne said. Tom sighed. It wasn't what he had hoped to hear, not that same ecstatic, kill-frenetic joviality, but it worked. He picked up her bat and brought it to her, waiting for her ti grip it before he pulled her up with it.

"They can wait" Tom demanded. "We're heading for the cafeteria, aren't we?" Yvonne nodded, still sullen and shaken but now standing. Her eyes were red and deep with sorrow, but over them she glazed a hopeful fury. She focused on killing, only on killing, and saw more of the living pus ooze from the walls. "Shit. We need to move. With this much symbolic fat we must be on the level of the cafeteria."

"That's a broad notion" Yvonne said cynically as she began to run. They broke out in full flight away from a pooling, rushing wave of moaning flesh before she spoke again. "How can you be so sure?"

"They don't get fat eating each other" Tom explained. "They get fat eating food, most likely. They get stronger, maybe even older or smarter, from eating each other or living things. We can't let whatever that shit is touch us too long or it'll absorb us whole and become more powerful than I can imagine!"

"Well that sucks!" Yvonne whined. "Why can't this school had healthy lunches for its kids!?" The wave of sweating, liquid fat roared and rushed through the halls, compacting lockers and denting the walls, with all its legion of mouths and clawing hands screaming and grabbing at the air...

* * *

The roar of a chainsaw broke through the thunder and the grinding of metal pierced the air with greater ferocity than any lightning. Mort tore his way through a metal construct while Johnny stood at its top, leaning far to the side to keep his balance as the post he stood upon fell down.

"That's a fucking awesome idea!" Johnny proclaimed as he leaped away. Mort swung over his head, right at Nny, but the dark phantom was already long gone and on the ground, ready for more. Mort growled with the roar of the engine and dashed at Nny, swinging with the torque of his hips and the pull of his chest powering his mighty black arms.

"You can't win, demon!" Mort decreed. "I hold the true power here! I'm the one with the fucking chainsaw!" He stopped his body mid-motion and reversed it, bringing it back. Nny jumped over the saw, landed on its rattling static metal blade that held the whirring, madly powerful chain, and flipped away. Just as he landed he disappeared in a dark blur of movement, just in time to dodge a ground-ripping mighty blow. The chain ripped up a fissure from its residual motion after Mort had let off the choke and spat chunks of wet dirt all around. Mort lifted the behemoth device up and rested the engine compartment on his huge shoulder.

Adrenaline and testosterone pumped through his thick muscles. It coursed through his body and made his veins like knotted ropes in his arms and around his neck. It looked like he was wearing a wiry noose wrapped tight across his thick, broad neck. He growled, ripping the taught skin and shaking the very blood in his veins.

"Where are you!?" Mort demanded as he paced around impatiently. "I don't have eternity to hunt you down, you psychotic fool!"

"Fool!?" Nny called from above. Mort was passive. He was used to aerial assaults already and turned with a slide across the damp grass. He slashed his chainsaw down and forced Nny to the ground. Nny knew what came next. He started to back away as fast as he could. Mort revved the chainsaw and let it rip itself threw the grass and dirt in Nny's direction. Mort simply followed behind, holding it up. That's when a flash of brilliance struck in Mort's dark head. Nny continued away, vaulting up and over and onto a long, twisted construct and continued running away, ducking under the beams of metal just above his head. He slowed to a stop and turned around, hearing nothing but the loud fall of gathered rain from high above hit the ground near him.

"For a guy who talks about fate so much" Nny said "he doesn't know his Tarot. The Fool is the ultimate trump card. It goes over the World and defies all rules and laws....just like me. I'm glad to be called a fool."

"What about a loon?" his conscience asked.

"Fuck off!" he shouted. He threw a knife, one of his good ones, at her and it passed right through without any damage at all. Like a knife through a nonexistent being (exactly like that, really). Johnny too late realized what he had done and cursed at his empty hand. "Shit!" He resorted to a more contemporary weapon, a chain, which he would surly use to even the grounds and break Mort's fiendish device. He waited in silence and paced in a slow retreat. His conscience floated beside him, peering into the darkness, watching for a sign of black skin on black light.

"Maybe he ran" she said.

"No" Nny said. "This is a lucky one. He isn't going to run away like an ordinary human. He's....._not _an ordinary human."

"Are they ever with you?" she asked.

"Most of them were" Nny said as he disembarked back onto the wood-chip ground. "That's the problem. I killed a lot of normal humans. Now all that's left are freaks and weirdos and maniacs like me. The herd was thinned too much. Now the limit of my slaughters are inexorably cut down."

"You could just resort to murder of your own kind, couldn't you?" she said.

"Fuck that" Nny said. "Too much work." He waved the matter away and began swinging his chain, listening to it whoosh. Something was coming at him from the darkness, something above that whooshing sound his chain made. Something was shaking the darkness, the very absence of light itself, and roaring viciously through the thick structures that occupied the unseen space. Johnny knew, instinctively, a chainsaw was coming at him, but it still sounded away enough for him to escape from. He made his way into a wide, open area, away from all manners of obstacles and constructs, with just his trusty hooked knife in one hand and a chain limp in his other. The roaring continued, intensified, and finally became clear.

Johnny ran. He didn't have much room to go but he still ran, ran away from Mort who stood in a low crouch with bent knees atop the engine box of his chainsaw **as the ripping, tearing weapon moved itself with incredible speed across the ground, the chain acting as a tread where it was stabbed into the dirt.** Mort roared his own beastly howl right along with the chainsaw's hideous whine and grind of dirt against its blade. A narrow spike of dirt was spraying out from behind. Johnny had grit his teeth and was fuming as he ran.

_It's not fair_ he thought. _I've always wanted to do that!_ Johnny vaulted into another construct, ran to a dead end and doubled back. Mort was already after him, ducking down while his menacing device tore through the feeble plastic mold of a flooring the kiddy building had. Mort grabbed the handle of his weapon and made a hop up. He pushed himself back with a whip of his head and the drag of his giant back muscles. The resulting backflip tore through the dead end Johnny encountered and set the chainsaw back in the dirt to tear itself along as normal, outside the labyrinthine hollow where Johnny now meandered through. He was lost, completely, and somehow wound up in the middle of the maze already.

"Well damn!" Johnny said, placing a palm to the wall and **a revolver to his head.** "I guess we won't get to see much more of this fight tonight!" Johnny squeezed the trigger and waited for a bang. He waited and waited, but no bang came. He shot through the entire chamber more than tice, always listening to the obnoxious circling patrol of the godly tool of destruction below and its god-like wielder. Johnny glared at the revolver, trying to strike some fear into it, and stowed it angrily in his coat pocket again. "Well fuck. This is just all kinds of creamy and sweet...." He pocketed his hands in a huff and leaned against the plastic cubicle wall.

"Now what?" he asked. Mort continued circling down below, always scanning the surface of the construct, keeping a steady eye on the moving winds within it. He saw no point where the wind had stopped, no sign of his evil anomaly of a foe. Granted, the wind around Johnny stopped close to his frame, and spotting a small patch like that through tiny holes manufactured in the surface of the hard, black plastic was a task in itself. Mort eventually hopped off his mount and just glared around like he was squinting into the sun.

"That sneaky little bastard" Mort cursed. "He must have escaped. Damn demon. Fucking thing! **RAAAAHHH!!!!**" In his momentary rage Mort revved his chainsaw and hacked through a solid metal pole supporting the huge, arching structure like it was barely there. He still spun around from the force of the attack and managed to bring the weapon to a rest on his shoulder, the blade safely behind him and revving in idle. Now calm, he removed his goggles from his head and saw the field in full color, **including Johnny perched like a flag atop a monolithic pile of steep metal and plastic.**

Nny hit his blades together and echoed a ting through the entire yard. It was so sharp that it stabbed Mort's ears and he could feel something heat up with blood from inside his skull. Johnny lowered his arms, knives still armed in both, and brought the back above his head with another chime of his bell. Each strike, in an odd succession, rang in Mort's ears for seconds afterward. Finally Nny stopped, having chimed thirteen times, crossed his arms and grinned.

"You hear that?" he asked, his voice just as plain in Mort's ear as if he was talking right next to him. "That's the sound, alright...." Mort could see something disturbing forming around Johnny's body. The homicidal maniac was kicking up a mighty wind that spun around him like a deadly vortex, a tornado made of skulls and dismembered bodies and screaming faces. Johnny threw his arms out once more, straight out form his body, and brought his knives up above his head silently. No ting, no other motion, just a deaf silence hanging in the air, broken by thunder. **"It's that time of day! The time of the Ultra-Violent!!!**" Johnny brought his arms down to pose with laughter, but Mort stopped him. He stopped him with silence as his chainsaw died and the muted fall of water was heard once more.

"NO!" Mort demanded with a furious pointing finger. "You are not-_not-_Malcom McDowell. Never! I have seen that movie three times and read the book eight. _Eight!_ How many times did you read that book!?"

"Once" Johnny said casually. He lowered his arms, the drama of the moment obviously over. "I mean, that's enough for me. Didn't you understand it the first time through?"

"No" Mort admitted. "Granted, I was young when I first read it."

"Does that explain some things?" Johnny asked patronizingly. Mort scoffed with a smirk and hipped his hands.

"You ask a lot of questions, doctor" Mort said. "Obviously no, it didn't. I can't recall a book that impacted my murderous drive more than the biography of Hitler."

"Why'd you read that?" Johnny asked.

"Protest" Mort said. "I demanded it in prison and they supplied it. I just wanted to prove that I could.........weren't we doing something?"

"Die, fucker, die?" Johnny said.

"That sounds right" Mort said as he drew out his chainsaw again. "You know, this is unfortunate. I'm starting to like you, Demon."

"Nny" Johnny said. "Just call me that." He landed on the ground, spun his blades around and held them underhand. He stood like a monster, his bony, stick-thick legs and arms posed like a spider's and his slender body bent over. His black wings were folded into the form of a coat, though it was just a coat after all. Mort revved up Gore once more and thrust it into the ground. The dirt blasted away like guts from a corpse. Roaring and growling the machine moved its cutting chain so fast that it became a shining light.

"Well Nny" Mort began in a British accent, "are _you_ ready for a bit of the old.....ultra-violence?"

"Not into rape" Nny said plainly. He dashed in with wide, long jumps. Mort stomped in a spin with his weapon wound up behind his back and threw it down carrying all the weight of his momentum. A blast of light and death filled the yard. The atrium was ablaze with a light of terror.

Then it was quite. A moment of silence in the chaotic world of violence and blatant old references to gory, social commentary works by old, dead men.....


	73. Singing, Just Singing, in the Rain

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

To no tune, rhythm or reason did these two fight. They just fought in the hopes of watching some blood spray. Mort had the best chance of seeing more bone and guts mesh and mix and blast together in a phantasmagorical display of ridiculous gore. The offense continued without relent. Nny slashed and hacked with his knives, making curving paths of windless fate for Mort's thick neck. Mort drove his chainsaw through the wildly whipping winds for anywhere in particular. With his weapon, a single hit would be sufficient.

It was a standstill. They both stood on hollow ground, on a flat stretch of wet, soft grass and mud in the middle of the tremendous atrium/playground, fighting for fun and fighting for blood. Mort stomped forward, risking his leg, and wound his chainsaw up behind him, his legs torqued with the strength enough to snap a bear's neck. Nny jumped far away to avoid the powerful swing he delivered. The grass beneath him was violently torn from the very dirt. The force the chainsaw carried as it tore through the wind was enough to rend the sod at Mort's feet and carved a crescent of mud in the ground.

"Nice dodge!" Mort called.

"Dodge what!?" Nny called back. Even though Mort's ears ascended humanity's range and canceled out the damaging decibels of the roaring chainsaw, Nny still heard its monstrous roar above everything else and could barely make out a single thing Mort said. Nny, thusly, expected a ranged attack of some sort and took the defensive measures to prepare for it. Mort began a dash forward and held his chainsaw at his side, like a partisan spear, ready to thrust with the power of his torqued hips. He stepped right-foot forward and extended his arm full with the chain grinding the air to push the destructive construct up. Nny leaped to the side, and was hit by a blast of grass. The stab had blown a straight gash in the ground and the grass was blown in every direction. Mort was grinning mad. He equipped his goggles and followed the demonic blackness where the wind didn't blow.

_He's a fucking monster!_ Nny exclaimed to himself with a sinisterly entertained grin. The sadist fury within him was awakening as he prepared for violence once more. He grabbed from within his coat a fistful of long, metal needles and threw them at Mort. Mort swung his chainsaw and deflected most of the needles. Those he didn't sank just below the skin of his taught, rock-solid shoulder. He flexed hard and the needles fell out, thin traces of blood still on them.

"Nice one" Mort growled, hearing only himself. "Those stung pretty damn bad. I assume they have some kind of special design to be able to effortlessly inflict injury like that. Acupuncture needles maybe? Or just delicately rolled razor-thin sheets of metal to tube the blood out?"

"What!?" Nny called. "Are you hurt? I can't hear you!"

"Then DIE!" Mort called. He stabbed his chainsaw into the ground like a barrow and ran with it as the chain moved against Mort's guiding direction, throwing chunks of loose muddy dirt up into the air. An unnatural rain was chasing after Nny. Mort's intent of the attack was unknown for too long. Nny eventually broke through it, circled around wide and came to Mort's unguarded side. Mort pushed the chainsaw up and let it idle loudly in the ground while he brought his fists to defend. Nny stabbed in familiar motions, psychotic wound arms and deep, killing swipes. Mort kept his fists steady and tight as he punched away Nny's attacks.

The match drew to another stalemate as Nny found himself on equal ground to the unarmed monster of a man he faced. Even with his knives Mort's reach was longer and his physical power was much greater. He was able to push away Nny's attempts with ease and counter with his own powerful punches. Nny's body was thin and agile enough to dodge Mort's heavy, boxer-strength punches but he was still outclassed in terms of straight-up brawling. So he retreated and lithely moved between the bars and poles of the metal constructs around him to gain an advantage in height. He pounced from high up, both knives glaring. Mort brandished his chainsaw and held it up to intercept Nny. Nny fell right down, making no attempt to attack until both his feet were planted on the ground. Then, with a dash forward, he stabbed into Mort's abdomen. A quick cough of blood and Mort realized his pain and predicament. He let go of his chainsaw and let it drop with a loud thud to the ground.

Nny had dashed away and was hopping from foot to foot like a boxer keeping up his footwork. He twirled his knives around in his fingers and waited. Mort revved his chainsaw and brought the engine hold up to his shoulder, preparing for a charge-powered thrust. He stomped forward and grit his teeth with his lips parted to show Nny the anger that had built up in his mouth. Nny stood fast and prepared. Then he tossed his knives aside, drew his hands into his coat and pulled out his chain once more. Mort knew his plan. Nny whipped the chain and caught it on the revving chain of the saw, then let go as the length of the metal was coiled and tangled up against itself on the track of the machine. A whining metallic groan and a severe grinding of gears and components rang out loudly and pierced through the thick winds of fate into Mort's ears.

He dropped his greater weapon, retreated while it continued to rev itself into disrepair, and drew out his reserve weapon. From his deep pocket he wielded a trowel, a small and sharp garden shovel, akin to Nny's knives. Nny grinned wide. The vantage was now his. He retrieved his knives from the ground, swung the mud and dampness from them and rushed in. Mort put up his best guard and defended himself against the frail-framed man's immense killing power. Each stroke of Nny's knives painted a gory path through the air, but the colors failed to show each time the metal connected with metal. Yellow sparks and orange tinder flew, but the much-sought red refused to show itself. It still oozed from Mort's abdomen and froze in a brownish halt on his shoulder, but the shining silver could produce no more than that. Mort rolled away, a tumbling rock of darkest brown, nearly black, and with both feet on the ground pushed up in a flying leap over Nny's head.

"Wendy!" Nny shouted. "You can fly!" Nny wound up one of his knives and spun his whole body to throw it. With a rush of air the dagger sliced through the winds of fate and delivered a deep slice into Mort's left arm. He grunted with the pain and landed, spinning himself around in the air and catching the ground with his injured arm pressing hard and squirting blood from his newest wounds. He glared through the black tint of his goggles at the windless void that rushed for him and drew his stance once more. Mort swept Nny's legs from the ground and rose up his right arm. His first intention was to stab, but the trowel refused to cooperate as it was in his other hand. He followed up with his second choice of attack, a sharp elbow drive straiht down. Nny was hit on the side and forced to the ground so hard he bounced and went white-eyed. Mort stepped forward and punted Nny's body into a metal pole, which he dented and bounced off of, landing in a pile of himself on the ground.

"RAGH!" Mort roared. He shook his face and slapped himself awake. With a glare his wounds stopped bleeding and his left arm went limp. "I'm not any ordinary murderer. I have total control of my existence, inside and out! Look!" Mort jutted out his hips and flexed his glorious six-pack of abs in the dim light. The blood was there, wet and fresh, but the wounds had already scarred over and stopped. Only the feint outline of blood remained to potentially bleed over, scabs ready to be peeled, and as he flexed his skin pulled at them slightly, producing the tears of blood more akin to broken skin than to deep guttural wounds.

Nny, somehow, recovered and stood straight up with a slouch. He looked at his arms and over his body with a flat expression. "I'm alright" he said. "How? I should be broken in more than once place after all that...." He turned to his conscience, who continued watching, hovering nearby on her cockroach legs, and turned his blunt apathy to a look seeking sympathy. An ironic look. "How much do I weigh?"

"120?" she guessed. "Maybe less? You're underweight, but not grossly so, I know that. Why?"

"Would a guy that thin, and this tall" he said, measuring himself with his hand "make a dent in solid metal?"

"That metal is hollow" she said.

"Ah" Nny said. "That explains it." Accepting that as his explanation, he retrieved a long blade, thin and evil with a straight hand guard adorned with a satanic smiley face, from within his coat and aimed it at Mort. "I guess I still don't know my new strength!"

* * *

The chainsaw Gore continued to whine and clatter with the loud mechanical error that Nny had given it. An extra chain to tie itself up with, stolen from a train yard while it was still new and unused. It was nearly guaranteed to break another chain, even human bones, with hard enough contact. Still, though the weapon went unwatched, the chains were neither breaking nor broken. The revved around the geared tread together, tangled and messy. Nothing was going according to plan except for his manual offense. Now with the superior advantage in arms, Nny took the most direct killing route he could and began his attack. He gripped his Gothic sword in both hands and grinned with round, white eyes as he attacked Mort.

The trowel was hacked from his strong grip almost instantly. Mort knew his disadvantage and went to correct it as quickly as possible. He retreated in long steps, powerful slides, wide side-to-side shifts and acrobatics that only his immense frame could handle while Nny pursued in a blood-drunk stagger, swayed by the weight of his own sword to move forward, to the sides, and in circles as he slashed and hacked and stabbed at Mort's colossal body.

_I have the height, weight and pure power_ Mort thought. _However, in terms of speed, agility, sheer weight control, I believe this man may have me outclassed. He is an experienced killer, not meaning that he is experienced in fighting, and his weapons are as many as they are to me mysterious within that arcane trench coat of his. I must separate him from that wicked bag of tricks if I am to gain the advantage once more!_ In the flight of his mind, unconsciously, Mort forgot he was human and, in his retreat, ran up a vertical pole to narrow, frail and thin to support his weight. He found himself at the top, looking down at an amazed Nny who was shaking the tip of his sword his direction. Then he pointed it to the ground and tapped the ground. Mort shook his head.

"Come down" Nny said.

"No" Mort refused.

"Come down and face Nny!" Nny ordered with patronizing voice. He tilted his head for added effect.

"You come up here!" Mort demanded. Nny grinned, spun his sword around his thin body and jumped up in a single leap. The air and moisture trailed behind him, like a spiraling tail extending from his heels. He was still in mid-spin when Mort dropped. Nny swung, just missing the top of Mort's head as it flew down, and sliced cleanly through the metal rod. Mort was sprinting down the angle an headed straight for a flat, plastic surface. He jumped off, reset his gravity, and used the motion to jump across the grass to his chugging chainsaw to rev it down to idle and pry out the chain. Nny landed, twirled the blade around him with a snicker of wind, and sprinted after Mort. Mort managed to pry some of the chain out and rolled away, carrying it with him in a sudden defense. Nny's blade clashed against the chain and deflected the force right back at him. His arms were flung up and the sword nearly from his gloved hands, but he regained his composure and simply dashed away. The sword was stabbed between his feet and leaned upon as a cane while he watched Mort recover. Nny's smile was calm and his eyes very leering. Half open and steady, like a lucid dreamer in the depths of his own mind.

"Goddamn" Nny said. "You're strong! I can't even defy gravity, and I weigh a lot less than you! Look at you! How much _do_ you weigh, you fucking tank?" Mort didn't reply. All the strenuous avoidance in his strategy was tiring him out more than Nny. He began to wonder, seeing how calmly and slowly Nny breathed, if the man even _had_ a limit at all.

_I may be working against myself_ he thought. _I need to improvise better. Brute force should be enough to stun him. Then I can use superior strategy and killing ability to bring him down._ Mort stood up and shook his head rapidly, waking himself from whatever stupor he had exited. He paced back from his chainsaw and threw down the chain, still tangled but now exposed on the outside of the chassis. Nny took up his blade and rushed forward again. Mort began running backwards with his right hand behind him and grabbed onto one of the plastic platforms of the infinite jungle gyms. With a roaring growl he ripped apart a huge chunk of matter and sent it flying at Nny. Then, stirring up the blood in his scarred left arm again, he pryed piece after piece of assembly from the construct and heaved it Nny's way. The plastic was easily cleaved bu the metal was more uncertain, and Nny dodged to the best of his ability. His skinny, lithe body at times disappeared behind the assault of foreign objects and then reappeared as a dark shadow crawling across the ground.

"Getting desperate are we?" Nny said. A heavy box of metal came flying at him. With a powerful stroke the object split apart on either side of him and bounced away while Nny twirled his blade in one hand from side to side of his body, all with the slightest grin and the most evil angles in his eyes. When the storm of debris stopped and resources were dried up, Mort turned to nature and heaved a heavy boulder from under his feet over his head, flexing every God-given muscle in his giant, powerful body to keep it up. Then, with a roar and a step, he lurched forward and threw the rock with all his worldly effort at Nny. The maniac stood with his sword simply pointing the at the boulder, ready to shatter it with the slightest motion, but something unprecedented happened.

A bolt of lightning snaked its way through a hole in the tarp of the atrium, burned the fresh smell of pure electricity into the air and struck the rock. It ignored all the metal poles and conductive, grounded material everywhere and curved, as if magnetically, to the rock which exploded with such great force that Nny was blasted high and away, onto another monolith amidst the sea of towering, twisting metal. He caught it and nearly lost all his balance, crouching low with his knees up near his ears and his arms out for balance. He looked at his sword. Melted into a hook. He tossed it away, regained the balance with desperate arms swings and swimming motions, then coolly pocketed his hands in his coat and glared down at the open ground.

Mort had freed Gore and was revving it strongly. He ran forward with the monstrous weapon howling its grizzly, mechanical roar all throughout the battlefield. Nny took two new weapons, a thin-bladed sickle and a dagger that ended in a forked blade, like a serpent's tongue. Nny looked at the latter and stood up, eying it over, front to back, side and side, then he pitched it behind his back and drew out an identical sickle. "What the fuck was that thing?"

Nny dove down head first, sickle blades wound to slash with his arms across his chest. Mort watched him falling, diving down for him with his crescent blades, but kept running straight forward. The only thing to meet him now was a mess of plastic, metal, hollow wooden posts and other ergonomically playground equipment all thrown together in a nightmarish conglomeration. He revved the chainsaw until all he heard was a piercing whine and ran himself through the cluttered ruin. Nny landed on empty ground and looked back with a startled expression. A tunnel was perfectly carved and extended into an endless darkness. The roar echoed from it loudly, blasting out like the obnoxious bass of a douchebag's car as he drives into view from down the street. Nny recognized that sound well. All that was missing was the death-screech from the driver after Nny threw some kind of blade to decapitate him in his drive. Nny growled.

"Fuck-berries" he cursed nonsensically. "He isn't giving up! He's just moving the battle again!"

"Now would be a good chance to escape" his conscience said with a held note of persuasion.

"No" Nny growled. "**Fuck that. That's what humans do!**" Nny wiped his lips of their lusting saliva and sprinted into the tunnel. No sooner did his conscience peer into that darkness than did he turn around and come running out, screaming a long held profanity. ".....uuuuuUUUUUUUCK!!!" and hot on his heels was Mort, wearing a flashing, malice grin, following the chasing blade of his chainsaw...

* * *

The chase continued for too long. Nny found his way to a wall of Purgatory, all brick and vertical, not nearly enough sufficient cracks or meaningful protrusions to climb up. He leaned against the wall, panting heavily and staring wide-eyed at the ground.

"Fuck this shit" Nny said. He turned himself around with his back to the wall and slid down to the ground. His leather coat caught on the rough brick layer and stayed hovering above him like a shadow of nothing plastered to the wall. "That guy....he's too strong to kill. He's too mean to fight. He's out of my league!"

"You've gotten rusty, eh?" she said, leaning against the wall in new apparel. Now she was in a string-strap top that exposed her pallor shoulders and the sinuous musculature within them. Her pants were capri and opened up in bells near the bottom, but Nny saw no feet. Just skittering darkness, like the legs of myriad cockroaches moving about in scarce light. A blast of lightning lit up the area. Then in the rolling thunder the stealthy obliteration of matter howled out from Mort and Gore. Just as the thunder seemed to die, so too did the roar of destruction die down.

"It's not me" Nny said as he stood with a groan. "I'm fine. I'm still sharp. My blades are still deadly and all that shit. But I never, never, got the chance to fight, you know? I'm a killer...not a fighter, if that makes sense."

"You can only hurt people" she said "if they're chained up and shackled to a wall."

"Pretty much" Nny said. A short silence passed. The idle roar of Gore started coming closer and closer while Nny continued to stand alone with himself, staring up at the tarp-covered sky. Time passed constantly. The winds of fate began to pick up steadily and blew around Nny in an anxious torrent. He was surrounded by wind, but still he was isolated from it all. When he stepped forward, frightfully, the thick winds would clear a path and retreat from him. As his blades spun they cut the air and carved wicked spirals into the destined winds around him.

"One of us is going to lose" Nny said "but I don't think either of us are going to die right now. I can't and I doubt he wants to at all."

"Life isn't about want" she said. "You yourself proved life is about need and only need."

"Right" Nny said. He turned his glaring eyes at her and the winds blasted against her, whipping her away into a puff of black smoke. "_**Living**_** is about want. **This man wants to live, and who am I to ruin that for him?" Nny took his sickles and began an advance against the roar of Mort's weapon. He vaulted up onto a platform and ran along its inclined path, going up and up across the hard rubber and plastic matting surrounded by metal support. He saw his path end and fork to the right and swung his arm out to catch a slim pole to spin around without losing his sprint. He continued running, three stories above the ground, and kept a keen eye out for his enemy.

He continued his stylish free-running, leaping up onto the low bars and flipping through the high-hanging ones, running along the razor-edge of the slanted roofs. He jumped across a wide gap, where below he caught sight of the bloodless remains of some unliving beings caught in a bed of ragged, jagged spikes. He ran down the spiraling steps of a tower that ran around a thick, red metal pole, the humming of a chainsaw growing ever closer. Finally, from behind his own cover, Nny spotted Mort standing in a clearing, marking his surroundings and gauging distances. Nny grinned. Through the holes he peered through his malice shined out and glinted off the corner of Mort's goggles. Just as the giant man turned to catch the sight Nny was gone again, absorbed into the darkness and running into a small tunnel covered by a plastic-rubber floor with an inch of clearing to look out of.

Mort was walking again, his chainsaw idle on his back, searching calmly with a grim glower held behind his goggles. Nny rushed through the tunnel, a war trench that held the skeletal remains of some war-playing children in camo and hard hats painted green, and surfaced into a short stretch of open ground. He dashed across it and ducked into a small opening to another play fortress. Mort darted his head back at the instinct and glared in the direction he had come from. He felt the pressure of killing intent, the murderous mania filling the hollowness of his skull like a pneumonic fluid, but he shook it away and spat it out.

"Getting crazy in this shit" he mumbled as he marched. Nny was making his way through a difficult, obstacle laden artificial terrain of plastic, rubber, metal and wood. He vaulted, rolled, spun, flipped and crawled through the openings he could find, all without losing the momentum of his killing charge. This is how he fought. He was like a snake, lithe and agile, able to slip between the cracks in existence itself to get behind his target, whereupon he would make his killing blow. It wasn't fair, it wasn't honorable, but it killed. That's what Nny does. He kills. This man would die if only Nny could position himself in that golden opportunity to kill him, and then the senseless, pointless victory would be his.

Nny suddenly stopped, meters from Mort, behind perfect cover, completely unseen and undetected.

_Why am I doing this again?_ Nny wondered. _For fun? For the rush of the kill? Because he's the first legitimate thing I've found here worth killing? That's not good enough. I may as well retire while I'm ahead..._ But that human voice of Nny's was easily canceled out. Despite his internal, private protest, Nny exited his cover like a shadow and gave a deep gash across Mort's gut. Mort stopped and stood. No expression crossed his face. His mind and body were both filled with nothing. Nny withdrew his sickle and glared wide-mouthed at the wound. **It didn't even bleed.**

"Nice one" Mort said. He rose up an arm, Nny froze in horror, and then swung it down with such force that a powerful wind gusted and dented the ground. Nny lost his balance when that whipping gust hit his feet and toppled him to the ground. Mort drew out Gore, revved it up, and held it overhead, ready to thrust down through the dirt and Nny's skinny, snake-like body. Nny was at a loss for thought. He entered an inhuman realm and rolled backwards onto his feet just as Mort had thrust his chainsaw down. Nny exited his inhumanity with a surging feeling of overwhelming curiosity and confusion, Mort hadn't tried to slice Nny in half by the guts. His chainsaw was in the ground lengthways, aimed Nny's way, the chain digging the dirt out behind it. Mort revved it up and hopped onto the engine case. Nny began another frantic run up onto a plastic platform and rushed his way up to the higher levels. Mort was riding his chainsaw again, ducking under the teetering plastic-board bridges tied with rubber ropes and leaping over the low bars while the powerful chain tore apart everything it touched.

"Ha!" Nny shouted. He dropped down far in front of Mort, sealing him off from the rest of the straight canal of dirt and mud. Mort's eyes went wide under his black goggles. He had never thought, for the very life of him, that a man this thin with such a loose and fluttering coat could produce and properly wield **a scythe with a long, jagged, wicked blade.** What's more, as if to mock Mort's skewed perception of the newly bent-over and fucked-up reality, Nny began spinning it around his person in a gracious, deadly, borderline-Shaolin style of expertise.

_And yet_ Mort thought _I expected this of him much earlier...

* * *

Nny ran across the wide rampart edge of the bordering line of stuff that routed Mort into his straight away. Mort knew he had no chance to escape. His route was cut off by a maniac with a scythe one way and a turn too slow to make without risking his neck and throat the other. Mort viewed his situation with his scholarly intelligence and his soldierly mind and made his decision to lean forward and accelerate. Nny jumped across the gap with the blade held steady in Mort's way. The giant man wound back his thick, black arm and grit his teeth. Nny was on his right, therefore his right arm went back. He would strike at the perfect moment and seal the battle in his favor. Nny's plan was the same, yet dissimilar. He was to jump and twist himself around at the proper moment to lop Mort's head from his shoulders. With such a narrow choice of live and die, so narrow a path for him to toe, Nny could see no difference between his opponent and any other man shackled and chained to a vicious, bloodthirsty wall._

Lightning flashed. The area lit up. Their eyes flashed and glared, beaming bright murder that blinded them both for a moment. The clash was inevitable. Nny found his moment first and swung hard. Mort's chainsaw dipped down through the dirt and sank him just as Nny's feet left his solid brace of land. Nny was frozen in shock. He was in the air, dangling helplessly, his scythe too far away and carrying with too much force to withdraw for another attack, and his guard was completely gone. He was vulnerable in all respects to whatever machinations Mort was about to deliver. Be it a punch, a backhand, a roundhouse kick; Nny was prepared for the worst.

"**RAAAAAAAAAAAAAFUCKING DIIIIIIIIEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!"** Mort leaned forward, his chainsaw accelerating and driving with his weight guiding all his force and mass, and caught Nny's pencil neck between his forearm and massive bicep. A clothesline! A power-line! A choking, slamming, painful attack that carried Nny all through the narrow route and into another open area. Mort wound his arm far back with Nny still choking and gurgling against it and channeled all his force. First he turned his chainsaw with the twist of his feet, which carried through to his legs, which torqued and spun his hips, which twisted his torso which with a single, final, powerful flex of his chest threw his arm full forward. Nny bounced from one metallic object to another, leaving heavy dent after dent in the solid metal constructs he bound from, until his body finally hit the ground, rolled a few meters and stopped in the dim beam of light from an open door.

He pushed himself up on shaking arms and panted, gripping his throat and coughing while his conscience stood ahead of him in the beam of light, casting no shadow. She jerked her head and bade him to follow. Nny heard the chainsaw whirring and chugging against the ground and scrambled up to his feet. He looked back one last time and saw sparks fly in the darkness.

"FUCK that!" he shouted. "In the ASS! With SPIKES!!!" Nny ran away in a frenzied panic. He pumped his empty hands and legs and breathed squeaky, heaving breaths as he retreated. Mort rounded the corner to see him retreat into the building, his shadow moving against the yellow fluorescence. He hopped off his chainsaw, turned it off and sheathed it once more on his back with his shovels. The mighty man stood, his dark red scars and scabs fresh in the light of the school building newly opened before him.

"Seems" Mort began "the winds of fate neither converge nor entirely conspire against him. He is neutral to destiny. A fleeting figure who plays impromptu on this stage of life. He is neither the foil nor the straight man, the protagonist or the villain. He just....seems to be. But how? Is it at all possible to be born into such an existence without any limits or borders at all? Is he truly a being worth my trouble?" Mort looked around at the darkness one last time before he entered the light again. He saw the straight angles of all the pieces of architecture converging and diverging, the hideous chaotic mess of a nightmarish schoolyard expanding out before him all over again. Steps and ladders leading up and down, ramps, curves, walls, rods, bars, floors, ceilings, a demon with two faces.

…....and that's when Mort ran. "Regardless of where I stand, there _are_ forces greater than me at play here and now!" Mort ran into the building, just beyond the threshold, looked back at the demon reaching out for him with its long arms and bony fingers, chanting Latin verses, and he slammed the doors shut, bolting them together. He sighed and slouched against the door. It was no less better inside. The lights flickered, an aged grime covered the walls and once in a long while the figure of an anorexic ghoul appeared with the flickering flash of light. Mort sighed and rested his eyes. "This is becoming less and less appealing to me....this King of Killers shit...."

…..


	74. The Carnal Creations

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

On the red level Tom and Yvonne had outrun the fat ocean and sealed it behind them on the other side of an impenetrable door bolted shut. Though the faces pressed against the glass and pushed as hard as they could, they made no effort. These were screen-mesh reinforced doors, the kind even the most unruly of children from grades K and up could never break with their bare strength alone. Eventually the living flood receded and Tom and Yvonne stood at the farthest end of an endlessly stretching hall paved with marble-colored linoleum and walled with solid green brick, all of it swirling together in the blurring red light that illuminated from a ceiling vaulted so high neither killer could see it.

"I think we made it" Yvonne said. Tom lurched against the door and fell to the floor, first his legs falling flat, then his hips to crack as his body slid, as if liquified, to the hard surface. He groaned and and rolled himself onto his back with his arms far stretched out to breathe. "Tom?" Yvonne asked, forgetting her troubles in his painful eyes. He stared up at the ceiling and watched it spin. It was all spinning to him, just nonsense and noise in an unfamiliar, nauseating surroundings that made him want to vomit. But in this position he would choke, so he rolled to his side and lurched up as much as possible to hurl. Yvonne watched him, his torso and arms moving but his legs dead to the floor until he was done. Then he stood and shook himself awake.

"This place" he said gravely "is fucking with my vision. It's giving me perpetual vertigo. It's really, urk, really bad..."

"What can I do?" Yvonne asked. Tom vomited once more against the wall and choked out the slightest of acidic goo from his throat, forcing it out with painful, dry heaves until it was all gone from his throat. He wiped his mouth and shook again, this time his whole body from head to fingers to legs to toes.

"Let's just go" he said. "Obviously there's power on, but not the kind of power we need. We need normal light, flourescent light, so we can get through the rest of this....hell without all kinds of demons leaping at us from the utter blackness all around us."

"Agreed" Yvonne said. She was sitting at a table on a fold-out chair dented from the fatness of the asses that sat in it before, spinning circles with her fingers on the faux-oak surface. "I....." She rose her head to speak but couldn't form the words. Tom adjusted the strap of leather around his shoulder holding up his katana sheathe and jerked his head down the wide walk between the rows and rows of tables and chairs. Yvonne got up after he started and walked behind him, keeping herself ever alert to her surroundings.

As they walked the scenery took a stranger and stranger turn. Just as the normalcy of the entrance faded away into the bloody-red mist, new perversions of the plain complacent spacing of the tables began to spring up. At first it was minor, some maladjusted and crooked angles that impaired nothing. Some chairs were fallen or folded on top of the table or mangled and unusable entirely. Then the truly strange began. Some tables were folded up, reaching halfway up the wall and a quarter of their mass hidden by the height. Then tables were drawn into mysterious gaping holes in the walls, as if rammed through the brick by force along. Some were broken in half. Some were fine aside from the total lack of chairs and the bloody stained circles where chairs should have been.

Then the up got fucked and the weirdest shit was seen. Yvonne and Tom huddled close together as they passed the most Satanic and sadistic of tables. Tables with chains protruding from the metal legs and feet detached from legs long since fled that were still nailed by long, hard metal stakes into the floor. One table had a row of effigies carved from what looked like long-dried meatloafs and other hardened foods, all with their heads or guts impaled. One table had an actual skeletal corpse chained from the farthest corners of the table atop it, mad circles of long-corroded ketchup drawn in magical emblems of dark praise and sacrifice all around it. The freshly rotted bodies of girls with the hair still intact and attached to their scalps were chained by their skinny legs and face-down in some hideous, placid oil-stain gruel.

"This is just getting stupid now" Tom said as the newest stretch of strangeness broke through to his vision. Yvonne winced and huddled up tighter to him. **A table was on a wall,** angled in no real way with chairs scattered about, defying gravity. More and more tables appeared as such with the dried marks of what used to be puddles, of God know what, underneath them, until finally the hall was barren. No puddles marked the inverted-gravity tables anymore. Tom and Yvonne just kept walking, hoping to find some semblance of order in terms of an open cafeteria window, and at a great length stopped to rest back-to-back in the middle of a wide nothingness.

"Does this school remind you of anything?" Yvonne asked.

"Nope" Tom said. "I was pulled out of public school for being too....**violent.** They were scared of me, because I liked to play games like 'Hunter/hunted' and I stalked people all day just to scare them later, or I gathered information on where certain people were going to be at all times for fun. They thought I was planning some sort of Columbine-esque terrorist plot, except I had no accomplices to do it with. My parents just knew it was my nature. **My nature to be unholy and murderous.** The knew, and still, they put me there...They knew, and still...." Tom was clutching his fist and gritting his teeth, hard. They creaked.

"At least they _knew_" Yvonne said. "I just found out what I _don't_ know could fill up a book. Two books, maybe, and a pamphlet. All my life sums up to is what a glorious fuck-up I've been to myself."

"I sympathize with you" Tom said. "I've....come to learn unwated facts about myself recently...."

"Were you robbed of innocence without your knowledge?" Yvonne asked. "Were you forced into a cliché collection of fears for life because of horrific events you'd never remembered, and are you the world's easiest royal lay because of one explosive loss of self-control that required brain-surgery to fix!?"

"I'm a monster" Tom said. He then fell limp against Yvonne's back. She pushed him away and shot to her feet. She was prepared to walk away but the cramping loneliness all around her prevented her feet from falling too far from his body. She teared up and bit her lip. Her tongue slithered out to lick the salty tears away and spit them out, as they reminded her too much of other salty things she'd wished she had spit at points...

"What's so bad" Yvonne asked "about being a monster?" She waited for a response. All she got was silence, and in time, wheezy breathing. The breathing intensified into a painful, dragging whine for breath through a thin, dry throat. She realized, with a gasp of horror, that Tom was no longer behind her. And she was no longer in a lonely, barren area. She found, with a quick glance past her tears, **she was surrounded.

* * *

Huge, tall, fat monster children with leering, bulging eyes and tremendous arms of fatty fingers thick as she was long, were leaning against the tables from which a web of chains extended and ended just behind her. There were eight of these monsters, four boys, three girls and one indistinguishable, all with the hideous doll-like appearance of grade-schoolers. They held their mouths open and drooled, the sick water of anticipation flowing past the scant, tree-trunk teeth they had protruding unevenly from their ripe red gums.**

"Skinny!" one shouted in a grubby, childish voice. Yvonne first looked at her own waist and blushed from the praise, then realized that she wasn't the one on trial at all and turned around. The emaciated body of a writhing young man, skin colored a dead-dirt gray and strands of thin, wispy hair falling short from his head. He was like one of those rotted female corpses save for the skin still on his face and the hungry stare in his deep, blue eyes.

"Stick-man!" another called. "Branchy!" another taunted. They all fired off seething shots at the man's brittle frame, each of which seemed to pass by his ears in favor of the constant pain of hunger he had. Yvonne stayed still, hoping the giants around her had vision based on movement, and listened to what seemed to be an unfair judgment. The man bound from all angles with chains, forced to his bony knees out of pure tiredness and pain. He let out a shaking, painful groan of air and lurched forward, caught from falling by the chains. The giants giggled at their hostage and finally fell their tired notice upon Yvonne, slowly rolling their huge eyes around in their thick eye sockets to view her with seething contempt.

"Too bad for you, cannon-tits!" a wide-mouthed boy proclaimed.

"You're stuck in there with him, now" a girl shouted. Yvonne held her ears. The smacking of their gums together was sickening and the stench of the very air they occupied was driving her insane with nausea. She staggered around, hit all at once by their grotesque aura, and collapsed at the bowed head of the victim in the ring. Yvonne reached up a hand, keeping the other one on her mouth to block the vomit, but he paid her no mind. She though he was dead until he coughed dust onto the floor.

"Be thankful" he groaned, a dry and creaking voice. "At least you've vomit to puke. I've nothing. Trapped for eternity in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts gone to hell and back, a backwards prison for those who gave in to far too many of life's lustful chores. For sins I've long forgotten and can't remember, I am eternally cursed to starve and wither only to live to endure the terrible presence of these heathen gods...." Yvonne's eyes swelled up with tears, her mouth with saliva and her nose was clogged. Instantly all was was expelled and she puked in a pile right under her face.

"Someone help!" she called, weak from puking. She mustered up a powerful breath and arched her back to cry an echoing blast through the air of **"HEEEEEEEEEEELP!!!!!!!"** Her stunning voice had stunned the demon gods around her into reeling back in distress. She sulked her eyes into her hands and clenched her lips between quivering teeth, openly sobbing before the tortured soul bound for eternity to a miserable existence, crying as if his pain meant nothing to her, her own ego ecplipsing the more obvious sorrow. Then, in that blameless accidental feeling, the wicked machinations of manipulation started to whir in her head, and she turned with a sullen renewal of hope to the corpse man.

"Can you help me?" she asked. "If you're torture is to starve, then your strength comes from feeding, right? Like the other wandering souls in limbo?"

"Correct" he said. "In this, the Purgatory of Carnage, where all who submit to their lowly carnal desires go, my strength is spread far and thin, and only through a proper sustenance can I be revived in full."

"So if I feed you" Yvonne said with renewed clarity, "you'll be free."

"Yes" he hissed.

Yvonne took a pause to collect herself while the demon gods prepared to bind her all over again in chains. "Would you....help me if I fed you?"

"Yes" he hissed. "Anything."

"Would you take care of me?" Yvonne asked hopefully.

"Yes" he said. "Forever...." The demon gods held their chains in their thick hands, like threads to them rather than thick binding iron, and they opened their sick maws to growl their echoing hate through the air. They hissed their judgment in arcane tongues, shouting unfathomable names Yvonne's way. Yvonne sat before the corpse man, her face to his, and touched her forehead with his flaky, desert skin.

"It's a promise" she said "that I'll hold you to!" With her happiness renewed and her confidence restored, Yvonne straightened herself out. Her breasts were now at eye level with the corpse gentleman. Then, with a coy and taunting glance over her shoulder, she grabbed her shirt at its bottom and removed it. "There" she said, "**eat up..."** Her bold gesture was taken in the utmost seriousness as the man gripped his withered old mouth around her areola and fed. She whined first in pain then cooed in relief, like a great weight was being lifted from her shoulders by means of weight being suckled from her tits. The demon gods didn't hesitate to act anymore, seeing this plan leading on to a greater evil, and threw their chains. They fell slowly and limp in the air around the girl, overcome by her seductive powers. Her eyes, as they were cast back, overflowed with a potent sexual energy, like a perfume that hung in the air for hours after it was intended, and stung the eyes of the giant beast's bloodshot red.

She was forced to turn back when the force of suction had increased so much and she felt a physical rush of liquid through her breasts. "Slow down" she said, wincing and holding back moans from the pain and pleasure. "I know you're hungry, but you'll leave me lopsided! Go to the other one..." She forced his head away and led it to her other, unused breast, suffering through the same wavering of pain to pleasure to sexual overdrive, lactation still oozing down the plump, soft underside of her used breast.

"**Wretched demon HARLOT!!!**" the demon gods of fat and carnage roared in utterly horrific voices. Yvonne looked to them with horror as they stomped over the boundaries they once hid behind. She lurched forward in a rush of liquid, a blast of ecstasy and an orgasmic vibration shaking all throughout her body. She grabbed the corpse-man's head of thick, sweaty hair and clutched hard, shaking so much that the chains around them broke and freed him. The demons were all within their own binding circle when they witness the rise of their tormented victim, his skin a healthy glowing white, his hair full and ragged and spiny out from his head, his lips still stained white from his feeding and his eyes, his terrible eyes, luminescent and blue. The set of eyes above his first were the same, set into his forehead and angled perpetually with hate.

"_**HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH"**_ he breathed. His satisfied sigh blasted the room and lifted the fog of light. Now only the dim shine of red was cast overhead and a natural brightness of darkened colors lit the floor where Yvonne sat rubbing her naked breasts in pain. She looked up at the man she freed, hoping to see some kind of gratitude, but he was already standing where she knelt and her face was forced to view his rejuvenated manhood in full.

_That cock_ she thought, entranced by the flesh that stared right back at her. _I know that cock...I've felt that cock....._ She then looked up to meet his eyes, like a lady, and saw the seething undirected hatred above that wicked, crazy smile. She saw him without hair, and with hair, and with only two eyes and with four, and each time, no matter how she looked, **she saw the same man. The same man, who years ago, raped her in the asylum. **This was him. In the ultimate twist of cosmic cruelty, Yvonne had freed the man responsible for her nymphomania, acting on that very nymphomania to free him! The tears swelled up instantly in her eyes.

The man cracked his neck, groaned in pleasure and rolled his shoulders. With a heavy, manly, iron-hard voice he called out with an air-shaking arrogance, "**Now-now-now-now-now-now-now-now WHO's gonna die FIRST!?**" He pounded his fist into his palm. Yvonne held her ears. She could only hear those erogenous sounds of lust in each wet movement of the giant's flesh and gums and the hardcore tones in the man's strong movements, and she couldn't take it. Left helpless, Yvonne broke down in a silent cry while her man stood fast to defend her. **"I think, for once, WE DON'T NEED ORDER! _RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHGHHHHHH!!!!!!!_"

* * *

"Fucking shiiit" Tom groaned. He had been separated from Yvonne, surrounded by fatty little bastards and fought his way through the no-table void to the front of the waiting line of white-eyed, half-tooth-mouthed demons in plus-sized clothes. They stood before his very objective, the cafeteria window, and he had vaulted inside and shut it down. Thankfully, no lunch ladies were there. Only food that just appeared at will and was carried off by the jovially girthy monsters from beyond to be devoured in the most unpleasant manner. Now he was alone in the kitchen while kids whined and cried and some demonically roared for food beyond the metal sliding sheet.**

"At least I got to a safe area" Tom said as he calmed his nerves. "For all their hellish strength, it's kinda haz that they can't get through a thin metal sheet like that...Oh well. I'll just exploit this glitch while I can." Tom got up and walked across the floor to a sink. He tried turning the water on but nothing flowed. "Right. Power switch. Main objective. I've got time, I think, to investigate for extras before heading back out onto the killing floor...." Tom searched around for a minute in the foggy, cold darkness before giving in to his greater technology in his night-vision visor. As soon as it whined on he saw something move in the stillness, a crawling arm duck just out of sight. Tom gulped.

_Shit_ he thought, _it's...what's her face. Samara? Sa..Sa-something. Ring girl. Oh shit, it's Ring girl!_ Tom drew out his gun just in case and kept a tight grip on it at his hip. A crosshair jittered across his digital HUD, showing where his scattered spray of fire would go when he squeezed the trigger in panic. He kept it as centered as possible. He stepped calmly around the corner, keeping a keen eye out for details and for movement in the corners of his vision. He kept walking, deeper into the kitchen, surrounded by fryers covered in cobwebs and dust, refrigerators that groaned lifelessly at his passing foot pressure, the hanging metal lights and the cleavers set out to rust in silence long ago.

_Shit's getting weird here_ Tom thought. _I sense a panic event coming soon. Yeah. I just passed a major event trigger......_ He stopped in place and grit his teeth in anger. Forgetting his caution he made a brave, loud kick to the metal tray stack at his side. A banging, explosive metal clutter shook through the kitchen area. The anorexic ghost that _was_ there, stalking ever behind him in the shin shadows of the ovens and sinks, crawled out from hiding in silence with a concerned look on her face. Tom's fist clenched audibly in his battle suit and a growling breath filled his lungs.

"**FUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!**" he roared. He slammed his fists into the metal of the stove in front of him and dented the hull beyond usage. He stayed in that position, with his hands gripping the cratered holes he had pounded, and cursed in whispers to himself. The ghost girl shiftily glanced around and attempted to make a retreat from the awkward breakdown, but she was caught by the snapping of a gun's frame. Tom was aiming at her without waver, but his gaze was still depressed to the floor. He had lost his energy to maintain a pure anger and was sinking into sadness.

"What the fuck am I anymore?" Tom asked. "Am I a monster? A man? A nerd? What have I become? I let that ass, that fucking snake-bastard Jormungandr do this to me! I let him win! He took away my life by letting me live! **What's the reason if everything I've ever known was just a fucking lie!?**" The girl didn't reply. She just stared wide-eyed up at him with her ashen pupils and wrung her fingers on the floor. "**WHAT AM I!?**" Tom demanded with a frantic swing of his jaw. **"WHAT THE FUCK AM I!?!?!?**" The girl just looked away and turned her head to curtain her face with the silken darkness of her hair. From behind that curtain as she turned she wore a smile. **Then her neck jerked and her face was three big holes, with jagged black edges leading into an abyss of emptiness. A curved crescent blackness for a smile.**

"Oh shit!" Tom shouted as he started firing and retreating. "It's Ring Girl!!!" Ring Girl contorted her body and shuffled along the ground with girlish giggles and demonic huffs of breath, crawling closer to the retreating Tom. He hit a wall and felt his back bend against a rod. He thought himself dead for a second. The girl sprung, her concave, rotted-out mouth filling suddenly with nails and her wide eyes narrowing to solid, inky streaks of black in the air. Tom glowered at her, hoping to stop her dead in the air, and shut his eyes.

_God damn it_ he thought in his final moment. _Why? What am I anymore?_ And through the spirit of the cosmos, through the ringing laughter of his oldest unknown foe, Tom was answered his question, and he found out what he was as he opened his eyes to the sickening wooden creaking that came from within his body. His rigid bones had lost their structure, his muscles had pulled and pushed them from joint without straying them too far to recover. A perfectly natural synthesis from mind to body. The want, need, to dodge enacted the physical reflex and, naturally, **Tom's head rolled upside-down onto his chest.** The girl's fangs sank into the wall just behind him and he slinked away from under her, his movements as fluid as the feeling that filled him. **He was without bones, like a snake.**

_No_ he thought. _This can't be...._

_**This is what you are, Thomas**_ his voice echoed.

_No..._

_**It's what you've always been.**_

_No!_

_**Denial will get you nowhere!**_

_NO!_

_**You and I! We are one!**_

"No!"

_**You are me! You always were!**_

"FUCK YOU!!!" he shouted, stunning the girl again in a coo of curiosity. She began screaming in bloody agony as Tom took his bone structure back and started driving his sword up **indescribable parts** of her. "I'm not like you! I'm not part of you! I'M NOT! I'M ABOVE YOU! YOU SAID SO! **DID YOU FUCKING LIE!? AREN'T I THE BETTER ONE OF ALL OF YOU! I SURVIVED! FUCK YOU, YOU SNAKE BASTARD! I'LL TAKE WHAT YOU'VE GIVEN ME **_**AND RAMPAGE WITH IT TO PUT YOU ALL TO SHAAAAME!!!!!**_"

The ground shook, not in his rage, but with some tremor force far away. He turned in its direction. Another followed, this one closer and sending a visible shockwave through the halls he had come through, breaking the tile and shattering the preserved order of metal on the shelves all around. Tom unsheathed his sword to swing the blood off and sheathe it again, uncaring about the corpse behind him that dissolved into ash from the sheer traumatic pain.

_Next boss already?_ Tom said. He looked at his hand and concentrated on it for a moment. At just the thought of movement his hand moved, and at the thought of moving in an inhuman way, his fingers snaked around each other and formed tight fleshy coils, no bones impeding their chaotic twisting. His wrist spun around and pulled at his garments as it wound. He felt no pain. He felt nothing unusual. It was all natural to him to do this, and with a sudden unwinding snap of his wrist, hand and fingers, he clutched tight human fist and furrowed his brow in newfound determination.

"I'm above those monsters" Tom said. "I'm a fucking **Super Monster! A damn Ultra Beast! Gaze upon me, ye unworthy, and grieve!!!**" He placed his hand on the hilt of his katana. More ash-skinned naked girls with long and short, straight and curly black hair and disgusting doll-faces came writhing up from the shadows, their wrists and ankles limply holding them up while their necks twitched with tension and their heads were blurs of shaking motion...

The final stretch of the Red Level before the terrifying bosses was before him, and his new abilities had been unlocked. Godmode was activated in Tom's heart and body. Total haxx were imminent.

* * *

Mort stepped into the hallway with his back tight to the wall. He slid himself down the long hall, seeing no end, seeing so far that the square scenery seemed to twist on itself and spiral onward, keeping ever alert of his surroundings. From around the corner there palmed at the wall an ashen, blemished arm which led the narrow body of a grim ghostly spectre girl that stalked after Mort with a gaping, skin-rotten black grin of fangs. Mort kept his eyes set down the hall, on its ceiling and in every doorway in sight, and monitored the changing flows in the winds of fate carefully.

Suddenly he smashed his fist into the girl's head. She gave a yelp of pain and fell silent as he grabbed her head tight in his hand and smashed it once more against the hard wall. Then he threw her for all she was worth into the other wall and she exploded into ash. Mort panted and shook his face, pressing back against the wall for protection. But it was a trap. He nearly impaled himself on the jabbing nails of another of these girl's and retreated just in time to survive with minor scratches through his underarmor tank shirt. He spun around and saw the girl retreat out of his peripheral vision. He closed his eyes and listened. The winds were whipping above him.

She was crawling on the ceiling just above him and dashed in her bizarre crawl, hand over leg over head over arm again like a twisting, falling human knot, and dashed at him. Mort rose up his leg and stomped on her, smashing her limbs as they were all folded at the strangest angles. Then he stomped again, this time breaking her neck against the floor. Mort opened his eyes with a huff and looked down the hall. All the doors within his sight were thrown open at once and from each an ash-faced, black-hole-eyed girl with the rotted mouth full of fangs bent out from around the corner, her white nails on bone fingers clutching the doors hard. They all stepped out in uniform struts and showed off their tightly seamed Japanese sailor suit uniforms with swaying stick-thick bodies.

"Bloooooood" they hissed. "Anger.......Hate!" they snapped.

"All sound and fury, eh?" Mort said, stepping back to draw out his Spade of Fate. "What are you creatures? What do you represent in this godless land of Purgatory?" They didn't answer. They just growled and filled the air with malice. "Aimless rage......I haven't wandered too far from limbo, it seems. I've just about got this place figured out. Care to listen?" One rushed. Mort slid his foot forward and tripped her. She went flailing through the air. He took the point of his spade to the back of her flying neck and slammed it down, falling after it to rest on his knee. The rest of the girls slammed their doors and stood by them, unafraid to rush in but also willing to give their superior in one-on-one strength the humor of their attention.

"This is Purgatory" Mort said, keeping both hands attentively on his shovel. "Therefore, this is akin and yet separate from Hell. It is an unruly, chaotic place where the strongest demons of any given stretch of land make the rules. Completely tribal. You section yourselves off by means of graffiti on the walls, all of which are living parts of this entire structure. Anyone who has painted their own self into the walls can marge and combine selves to create an individual that is part exile, part integration with all of limbo. Am I wrong so far?"

_Shiranai_ the girls all said. Mort nodded.

".......am I?"

_Don't know_ the girls repeated.

"You don't, eh?" Mort said with a sly grin. He stood up and withdrew his shovel with a slicing sound of meat and blood. The body that was sliced fell into a pile of ash at once. "Well, I'd say, class is in session, girls. Steep right up for your lessons..." Mort drew out his other shovel, Agony (or Penance. I don't care.) and clashed their heavy metals against each other in a clap of painful ringing. The girls all grew red glowing spots within their hollow black eyes and slowly began to advance.

_Kids I can't deal with_ Mort thought _because of their perceived innocence. Teenager, however, have no innocence by default, and therefore, are much easier to kill!_ And so it went. Against overwhelming odds, uncountable numbers in the Sailor-uniform land of Purgatory, Mort squared up and fought!


	75. Dark Harvest of Sinful Machines

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Sam had stood alone, silent and stoic for so long that he had become a tree as living scenery in the play that went on around him. Somehow the players had moved through the list of Shakespeare's greatest and were now on _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, dancing about and running between the prop trees and shrubs, giggling and tittering at the chase. The men, with their skull-faces and exposed internal organs through meshy, stringy rot of flesh that still precariously hung from their bones below, hopped and pranced around the scenes after the women. Their faces were also of skull but their wigs stayed glued to the bony crowns. Their flesh was more together but much thinner and exposed much of their internal workings through their exposed midriffs and arms and bone-thin legs. They giggled and laughed and pranced about in flight from the men that perused them through the forest.

_Kill_ Sam thought. _Fucking kill. I am a tree in the woods that fucking kills people..._ He was getting himself into character. He had already witnessed enough of the demonic magic on stage to know how to make things work in this bizarre new plane. He had to be in character before he could act, in more meanings than one. _I am a tree that kills people....I am a killing tree. Killing tree....._

"I am but a gentle Puck" a new player said, small and lanky with a face covered by mud and leaves and goat legs. "I hither come to tell this tale..." Sam, as a tree, moved across stage and quickly toppled over, splattering on top of the honest Puck and gushing out his elven organs across the boards of the stage. Sam's true body erupted back-first in a hung out of the tree and he adjusted his glasses.

"Behold" Sam said with a low, booming voice amplified by the acoustics of the stage. All the players stopped and gazed upon him. "I am the darkest shadow of Death and Despair. In my hands I hold the means to equalize the inhumanity of this cosmic plane." Sam threw up an arm and out from the sleeve he drew a small-barrel revolver. He lowered his arm again and aimed down at the center-most player, the man playing Lysander, and grinned a white smile under his white oval eyes set against an utter, deep-space darkness. "Pray!" Sam shouted. He fired. The skeleton broke and vanished into a cloud of bloody vapor which blew away and became nothing. The other players turned to him with eyeholes filling with bright red rage.

"This is the penance of my aggravation" Sam said. "Pray!" He drew out another hidden revolver from within his other sleeve and extended his aim toward Hermia. He shot but she dodged and he hit another tree which gave a hollow roar and imploded into a cloud of blood just like the other player. Sam began to run around, matching the player's trouncing trajectory, and trapped her in a circle strafe. He then broke the circle and dashed straight at her, throing his arm out with a shot as it traveled, blasting her into the same dark cloud that soon bubbled away into oblivion. Now Demetrius and Helena came upon him with their wrathful glares and roaring maws.

"Knavish demon!" Demetrius shouted. "Thou hast ended my love! I shall kill you!!!"

"Your love?" Helena said. She stopped and ended Demetrius herself with a stab of her powerful arm. Sam saw the morphing that rage on the set had granted. Her left arm was no longer a thin and pale stick of membraneous flesh and chalk-white bone. **It was a bulging mound of rust-colored flesh with fingers of protruding blades.** "Foolish Demetrius. If thy love lied with me, thou would not have died so vainly...." Sam pressed a gun to her head and hissed before firing. Her body stumbled forward and drew a ragged breath so Sam fired several times more, unloading the rest of his bullets through her face until, finally, she dropped into a wide splattered puddle of dark blood that fizzed and vaporized. Sam spun his guns and sheathed them with incredible sleight of hand inside his jacket, then turned to the ghostly audience of mist that applauded and cheered in moaning drones to take his bows. The mist erupted in geysers of water and energy every odd place until there was none of it left but a single solid entity. Sam glared up past his glasses and saw, through his cosmic eyes, an anomaly.

"Nice show!" the single audience said with his metal-toed boots kicked up onto the head of the chair in front of him. He kept clapping softly with his leather-gloved hands and grinned. Sam could see the mania in his eyes even from the stage. He kicked his feet to the ground and stood up with a grin, a mad and homicidal grin of careless humor. "I honestly believed, for a second, that you were a real tree!" Sam had no idea who he had just met. Nny had no idea where he was. They both stared each other down for the length of time that Nny clapped.

"I am Death" Sam said as he ran for the edge of the stage. "I defy the boundaries of life!" He jumped, a long and driven, powerful jump that slammed him against an invisible force which threw him backwards onto the stage again. He rolled backwards and skid his feet against the floor that ran beneath him to stop. He looked up, panting, and lowered his glasses just enough to see the barrier before him as a solid thing while seeing Nny and the space around him....**as nothing.**

"What is he?" Sam wondered.

"Eh?" Nny shouted, cupping his ear. "Speak up, pal! You need to enunciate on stage! Make your statements proclamations! Make a speech into a monologue! You're the actor here, figure this shit out!"

"Fuck it" Sam said. He would waste no time, in in sacrifice waste a bullet. He drew out his splendid, glorious gun of sacrilege and otherworldly terror and aimed it Nny's way. He tensed his finger and drew back the trigger, just enough to warn his body of the impending danger that came with firing such a gun, but withheld as Johnny began to walk down the auditorium by stepping onto the heads of the chairs before him like a long set of thin steps.

"If you wanna get out" Nny said "you have to end the play, don't you? Even so, no player can simply leave by the front of the stage. It breaks the illusion that you're in a play! You have to go backstage to leave, don't you?" Sam lowered his gun and drew away his finger. "That's how it works, right?"

"....That makes sense" Sam said. He sheathed his mighty gun and pulled out one less mighty, an automatic pistol with a rifle-butt attachment and a secondary grip near the barrel. He took a knee and aimed at Nny. "I am the sniper at close range, praying on the specter in the audience which plights my circumstances..." Nny heard his character and grinned. His eyes went wide and white, into shakenly-drawn circles over a jaggedly smiling mouth. Sam opened fire at Nny vanished, sinking away into darkness like a shade. He reappeared near the door and Sam turned to fire again. Nny disappeared and reappeared just beyond the muzzle flash of the gun.

Sam followed Nny but only saw him from the corner of his eye each time he changed position. He sacrificed his aim and held the weapon out like a pistol, like it was intended, and fired the rest of his rounds. Nny didn't vanish away from them, but none of them seemed to hit either. They hit the chairs and floor and walls around him, but none of them hit. Sam ran out of ammo and abandoned the gun on stage. He ran for the backstage around the trees who sweated the preserved their roles as scenery.

"Break a leg" Sam said. He drew out an incendiary grenade and lobbed it blindly behind him as he ran. It bounced and exploded near the base of a tree that was tightly pressed against several more trees. They were now trees burning quietly in the woods. Sam ran into a fork in the hallway and took the right, in the direction of the door he knew Nny had already gone through. He took another left after reaching the end of his straight hall, then a right at a four-way intersection, a left, another right, then straight into the middle of a hallway.

Everything was green. Even the light was green, and Sam was back in the thick of things, out of the alternate plane, right in the middle of an impossibly long high-school hallway. He growled and set his glasses. He drew out a compact briefcase and set it on the floor. Inside was a disassembled AK-47 which he assembled in seconds and loaded up with one of ten full magazine clips he carried under his jacket.

"Come out, come out" Sam said as he began walking again. "Who wants to play Kongo-Stalker with me...?" The lines on the walls didn't reply. The air in the halls didn't shake. Sam found himself sandwiched in the middle of Purgatory, in the green wing, without a hope or a prayer of finding his way....

* * *

One wasn't enough. There were so many, Mort had to take out his other shovel, and even then the insatiable rage of the Japanese School-Girl Legion hadn't let up. He was surrounded, throwing swing after swing to protect himself and end as many lifeless bitches as he could. Their necks snapped like dry desert twigs and their bodies burst into ash at even the gentlest contact between kicking foot and pale, black-cracked face. Mort slashed and smashed left and right, the Spade of Fate in one hand and Agony (or Penance, doesn't matter anymore) in the other. An ancient tool of murder and one just being broken in. Two shovels for twice the power, wrath and destruction in the hallway.

"RAAAH!" Mort shouted. He carried slashes through holding both shovels together, powerful driving blows that led through heads and into the floor where mounds of ash soon gathered. He stabbed his shovels into a girl's body and stepped forward until she was surrounded by her mindless comrades with their twitching heads and wide, black grins. Then he pulled them apart and killed them all with a sudden cross-slash attack. He had to step forward to carry through the blast of fateful wind that he made. He stabbed the shaft of his shovel into a girl's black, hollow eye and drove it all the way through her body, then punched it through her paper-thin abdomen with the titanium grip of Agony bracing his fist.

"ORYAH!!" he shouted. He headbutted a girl into ash. He spun around and cut those gathered behind him. He kicked blindly behind and blasted yet another girl into ash, then followed his foot through with a stomp and a slash. He powered through the hallway, stabbing with each powerful step forward he took, decapitating and splitting skulls left and right in front. He carried on like a train, with the unstoppable locomotion to match. Each stab killed something in front and each sharp draw back of his elbow killed something behind. Each stomp unsettled a mound of dust and ash that had once been alive and swirled a devastating trail of darkness behind him as he roared through the mass.

_Korosu korosu korosu_ they whispered in rage. _Korosu korosu korosu_ filled the air and echoed in the narrow, dark halls. Mort growled louder and louder with a steam of breath billowing between his teeth. His arms were getting tired and sore from the constant motion and his legs were getting tired from pulling all his weight. _Korosu korosu korosu_. _Korosu korosu korosu._

_Damn the life_ Mort thought. _I thought taking Japanese language classes would be a waste of time. Oh, hindsight, you turgid bitch!!!_

"ENOUGH!!!" Mort called. He brought the ends of his shovels together with a clap and began twirling the powerful conjoined weapon over his head. He crouched down and let the girls pile into the spinning blades. The girls began to think before they charged and ducked under the killing radius. Mort slacked his grip between the shafts and let the spades fall down, creating a protective cone around his body. The girls that crouched to dash in were killed just like the rest and blown away. Mort spun his legs, torqued and jerked his hips and finally followed through as he rose up with two powerful swings of his shovels to complete the winding hurricane attack. The halls were blasted with a mighty gust of wind that blew from Mort's feet and cleared the mounds and piles of unliving ash from his path. He had finally reached a new corridor, lighted by broken, flickering lights, and sighed as he proceeded. Yet another girl came screeching around the bend with long clawed nails out and nail fangs in her black-mouth grin.

"_KOROSU GA!!!!_" she howled with a pounce. Mort leaned backwards and drew in a long, powerful breath. He waited until she was right over him and her arms were prepared to close on him. She swung both her arms at once. Mort blew a sharp gust of air and slammed her into the ceiling. She grunted and began to slowly fall. Mort jabbed his shovel into her back and twisted her body into dust which rained down onto the floor as he walked away in a hurried march.

_That was annoying_ he thought. _What's next?_ Mort stopped at the end of the hall. It was unprecedentedly short. He was faced down with a set of double-doors with dried blood stains on the chrome push-bars. He sighed, made sure his goggles were tight over his eyes, and entered with his shovels still drawn. He walked into darkness with only the gracious halo of sight in darkness to guide him across long-and-narrow wooden boards on the floor. He walked randomly outward, following a seductively drawing current of wind that winded and snaked through existence in his dark vision. _Where am I going?_ Mort wondered. _Where shall I stop? Where is the end to this insipid journey of mine?_ Mort stopped. The current ended and spiraled in one place. Once he stepped into it the wind burst and the lights flashed on.

**An indoor gymnasium!** Mort found himself in the dreaded P.E. class setting. He saw no demonic children, thankfully. He was at the center of a huge, multi-purpose court with basketball hoops and fiber-glass boards drawn up by mechanical springs and frames. There were six total, three on each side of the gym's width. At either side of its length, outside the court boundaries, were fold-out bleachers that were folded up into the wall and half-covered with torn and tattered green tarps. Banners of illegible, demonic scrawling were hung high overhead and the hieroglyphic records of some random demonic effigies had been drawn into huge glass plaques that hung high on the walls. The crude drawings looked down at Mort as he looked up at them, showing that these demons were alive in the wall but trapped by the glass.

"Fuck" Mort said. "I can already tell what's about to happen here...." He glanced at the bleachers as the tarps were torn down from them by the ashen girls in loose, tiny cheerleader uniforms. Their wide black eye holes and black gaping grins remained from when Mort had killed them but their long black hair was all bobbed up into ponytails and stylish balls. Mort looked across the gym with a glare and saw the retreat of a cloud of ash creating more cheerleaders out of nothing to prepare the bleachers again. Then Mort looked at the walls bordering the width of the gym, and surely, as expected, the crayon lines of transport in the brick-and-platster walls began growing the arms, bodies, legs and faces of an entire middle-school and high-school troupe of kids. Mort looked to the opposite wall and saw the same thing.

He was in the middle of a court, and the game of the day was hung over his head, on the ceiling where he hadn't inspected yet. **Dodgeball**. Mort was quite royally fucked standing. The kids he saw fit the description of 'bully' and 'purposeless jock' almost too well. Young men who were overgrown in height, muscle and development of awkward acne and body hair dressed in matching team jersey's with their names and athletic shorts. Boys ranging from dwarfen, steel-eyed maniacs who shuffled their feet with limitless unguided energy to giant twelve-foot tall pale-skinned boys who had faces shaped like golf tees. All of them, every single one, held in their hands a regulation red rubber ball. The gym was soon filled with cheering, jeering, laughter and general crowded cavorting as the bleachers filled with a pale blue mist. Mort looked at the mist and saw through it to the ghostly images of parents, older siblings and other miscellaneous adults who called out names and numbers in a chaotic cacophony.

_I see_ Mort thought. _These being aren't real. They are the imagined specters from the hearts of these pitiful lost souls. They are mental support for these mindless demons, given form through an arcane form of existential hive-mind thought. They are the loved thoughts of unloved monsters....I can't touch them at all, it seems, for they are not truly here. Good. Less distractions for me to worry about._

Mort armed his shovels and witnessed his boundary. The middle of the court was marked with a circle, as it was primarily a basketball court. Mort didn't try to test his limits by stepping from it. He spread himself out and kept his sides to the two lines of throwers, prepared with a stern-faced scowl to fight them with his weapons and use their power. He grinned. A mad, wild, homicidal grin with furrowed, narrow eyes under the black-tinted goggles that showed him the world as it really was, the Plane of Remorse and Life Lost. The place where those who regret cornering their lives in a single act or entity, such as dodgeball or merciless sadism as a child, go to relive that same regret eternally.

The referee appeared with hollow black eyes and a thin-fanged grin stretching from corner to corner of his wide jaw with a whistle lodged in his ash-gray, black-veined throat. He drew a breath and let it through the whistle.

GAME ON!!!

* * *

Tom ran through the kitchen hall and stopped in each room to fight the growling, groaning atrophied monsters that lurked therein. Ring Girls, he confirmed them as. All the physical power of a contortionist and the hitting strength of a dynamo carnival strong-man with eyes of big, empty blackness bordered with crackling black flesh and a hissing open void of a throat beyond their crescent black smiles. Evil little things with sun-dried skin and exposed black veins under their paper-white, tissue-thin ghostly dermis. They moved like poetry written in liquid paper white with the trails of smeared and meaningless text following after them.

Tom cut them down without regard, warrant or thought. His arm wound up beyond any regular human possibility and slashed with the force of a metal-stringed torque whip. The girls were carved into pieces and fell twitching to the floor as piles of ash to be swept away by the next horrific tremor. Tom could see the wave of kinetic energy blasting his way like a bulging distortion of air followed by white gusts of dust and smoke. He leaped to the ceiling and wrapped his fingers around the tiniest bars. Wrapped them over more than once in tight, stringy coils of flesh without bone, like tiny snakes growing from his palms. The tremor shook the girls still on the ground and burst their fragile frames like glass. They fell into ashen dust on the ground and Tom proceeded, checking his flanks for enemies.

The demons managed to recover from their dusty state and stood erect once more with lazily reaching arms and rapidly twitching heads all around. Tom slid into a room with his Uzi drawn and sprayed fire while spinning on his back. The bullets pierced huge holes, bigger than the bullets or their actual impacting force realistically permitted. A single bullet blew open a hole reaching from navel to throat and fell detached arms from the torso. Tom stopped spinning and flipped himself up with a corkscrew kick. He landed with a careful slide and sheathed his gun, motioning at the same time to unsheathe his long blade. The girls moaned and collapsed into ash, prompting him to move forward.

He was now back in front of the wide metal slide surrounded by the clutter of kitchen objects and metal tray stands. On the other side was the expansive outside illuminated by redness. Tom breathed hard and looked back. The Ring Girls were slowly recovering and moving for him. From just under his nose one rose up with a whole mouth and wide, longing eyes to choke him. He struggled against her for a moment and attempted to free himself with a kick to her cunt. Unfortunately, being a ghost, she had no genitalia. Tom was risen off the ground in her powerful vice grips and choked out.

_FUCK!_ Tom exclaimed. _Now what....?_ He looked back and forth, his eyes beginning to bulge, and worriedly implemented a desperate border-line cheating plan. He opened his mouth as wide as he could, all the way until he felt his jaw click against itself, then unhinged it and let slither out his tongue. It narrowed and lengthened with twitching increments of growth, inching itself closer and closer to the girl's head.

_Nani?_ She said. Tom's tongue became sharp as a blade and **pierced her skull**, killing her instantly. She collapsed into ash and Tom fell, his jaw so slacked that it hit the ground before his knees did. He pushed it back up and clicked it back into place, looking at his hand and flexing all his fingers painlessly **backwards and onto the back of his wrist.**

"Okay" Tom began. "I think....this is actually a pretty useful ability....if I can master it...." Tom clutched his hand tight and looked around. The girls were fearfully keeping a distance but still pressed forward. Tom saw no ash on the floor save for the pile at his feet. From the other side of the metal sliding sheet he heard a monstrous groan and a whoosh of air. Tom jumped onto a fallen tray rack, then onto one still standing and leaped to the ceiling. The Ring Girls shuffled their way on all fours into the room, like a swarm of cockroaches in slow-motion, and rushed up to him. The shockwave came and blasted them all into the wall as thick layered coats of pale ashen dust. Tom fell after the ground stopped quaking and rushed for the opposite wall. He was staring at a circuit breaker.

"......DUR!!!" Tom shouted with a slap of his hand against his chest. "Of course it's here! Why not? WHY THE FUCK NOT!?!?!? **BULLSHIT!!!**" The girls began to recover in shivering groans and shrieks. Tom yanked the door panel from the box and eyed it down quickly. Every switch he could see was off. Therefore, without thinking, he turned them all _on._ The lights overhead, covered in cobwebs and dust, blasted on with a powerful light. Tom turned around and saw a Ring Girl up close, an inch from his head, her mouth wide open and rowed with sharp, nail-thick fangs of metal. She just hung in the illuminated air as if frozen in time.

Tom ducked under her, inspecting her naked body for a moment, and stood back up to see the rest of the horde frozen as they were coming from the wall and descending the fallen racks in their contorted way. Tom took his blade from its sheathe and slowly moved it through the mid-pounce girl's body. It passed through like her body wasn't there and the clean metal blade trailed short wisps of dust in the air after it.

"Well, well" Tom said. "I guess these things are afraid of light. Maybe this realm of darkness won't be so challenging now that my flashlight's obsolete!" Tom listened to the room on the other side of the metal sliding door, cupping his ear to the metal. He didn't hear anything. A hand reached through the air. Tom elevated the door silently so that just a crack was visible. The hand continued reaching, a finger twitching carefully. Tom didn't notice it. He looked out into the formerly red void and saw the air obscured and filled with kicked-up dust from some great fallen crater that destroyed the floor. The finger reached a switch. Tom saw many more craters near where he was and the wrecked, melted plastic bodies of all the children who had apparently been blown away and petrified by the initial tremors.

The lights went out. Tom's expression was priceless with surprise as he turned back to the darkness and saw the ghostly girl he had cleaved in two come crawling with her side aimed at him and a sinister growling in her voice. She pounced and uppercut Tom into the metal window slide. He opened it by hooking his toes underneath and pulling with his hands on the pipes overhead. The light shone in and slowed the girl once again. Tom flipped out into the open and slammed the door shut, snapping off her thin, white fingers as the metal sliding screen slammed down. A cacophony of growling, hissing and ghostly shrieking from within followed, barely piercing through the thick metal of the window.

"Glad that's over" Tom said. The hall was no longer red and empty of both children and tables, but it was by no means at all peaceful. He looked down the expanse of hall where he was certain he had come from and saw a **giant fat child-like demon fallen to the ground. The flesh on the back of its neck had been torn apart as if something was trying to dig to its spine.** Then Tom saw him, pulling and ripping at the thick meaty tendon's of the grand demon's neck just as the white-glaring eyes of another humungous toddler freak came stomping in from the distant, black mist.

"Tom!" Yvonne shouted. Tom jerked his head around and saw Yvonne hiding behind a row of plastic garbage cans. She waved her hand to call him over. Tom sprinted to her and vaulted over garbage cans, making no sound but a grunt upon landing. Yvonne took hold of him and hugged him with no intent of letting go at all. She sobbed into his soft armor padding and started shaking in terror. Tom hugged her back and pushed her away to look in her terrified eyes.

"Yvonne" he said. "Are you alright?" She nodded. "What the fuck is going on?"

"Tom" she began, "I'm sorry I couldn't sympathize with you..." Tom looked at her with a curious glance. He recalled their conversation from before, before they were separated so mysteriously. "I didn't know how bad being a monster could be until....**I made one.**" Tom looked at her strangely. Yvonne looked over the garbage cans to the huge corpse of the fallen demon and the lumbering one that came ever closer from far away. A sickeningly loud crack was heard, like a tree suddenly buckling and folding in half, and a figure leaped with a blood-drenched body from the hole in the demon's neck. He wore a vicious, wide grin of long, gumless fangs. His four eyes shone with a powerful, mighty glare. His body was taught and incredibly defined with large, powerful muscles. His spiny, bristling dark hair waved with each impeding stomp of the giant demon's approach.

"You've gone too far!" the grotesque blob of a demon bellowed in a deep, hollow. "You may have killed the rest, but you shall not kill me! I swear it!" The human-esque figure turned his sights upon the grim mountain of a monster and shook the foam of rage from his mouth. He tilted his head and widened all four of his eyes before commencing to a mad laughter. He stood on his toes and leaned so far back that his spine arched parallel to the ground and his head was upside-down and glaring at Yvonne and Tom in hiding. His bellowing guffaw of animosity filled the brightly-lit, endless hall with terror and rage.

"**BAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!!! I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU TOOOOO!!!!!!!"** That was all his challenge encompassed. He leaned forward and crouched low, very low, his chest sinking down to his parted knees, and he jumped right into the demon's tremendously wide, white eye. With a splatter of blood and the dumb groan of death the demon began to fall. The evil figure burst out from the top of the demon's jaw in a spray of blood, grabbed it by the webbed flesh of its fat cheek and followed it down to the ground. Just before impact he threw it's face into the floor and spread gore everywhere. Blood poured out like floodgates were opened. Its remaining eye popped out and leaked a grotesque, creamy lard, like cottage cheese spilling out. Brains erupted from its pudgy, piggy nose. Its teeth were all shattered and spread around. The man walked away from the scene wearing only his grim, phantasmagorical grin, a demonic glare and a thick, dripping layer of blood. He stomped to the ground and leaned back to howl in victory.

_This is my monster...._ Yvonne thought as she watched him. _This.....is what I can create......with my body, my spirit, my soul, this is what I can bring to the world. My tits carry the milk of destruction. **My body harvests sin and produces power.....**I am a monster...._

And so the monsters three stood together, one howling and roaring excitedly to the rafters and the other two standing together, bracing each other, with a world's worth of terror freezing their faces.


	76. The Dark Cave Entrance

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Through the jungle shade of vivid green Sam crept. Stalking a prey long-since vanished, without his knowing, he ran his shadow across the wall and stealthily outran his own footsteps into cover. This floor, in the long halls of dim green lighting, for some godless and inexplicable reason, had a variety of potted plants and random shrubbery usable by the vet for cover and flanking. He took to the shade of each ficus, hid behind each random cactus and darted through the leafy halls as if her were in a race. He grit his teeth and checked his gun every few plants he passed, just to be prepared in case his prey were to jump from nonexistent shadows and attack with knives or swords or whatever else he pleased to carry.

Sam ran low, under the windows of the doors and out of sight of whoever could watch. His militant, soldier mind was harkened back to the front of his conscious mind, and his subconscious workings seemed dictated by the intrinsic, constant force that willed him to survive against constantly oppressing forces from the beyond. His fear of the unknown was at a peak, and pushed further into it. At the same time, his desire to push forward and confront that fear, manage that fear, bend over and rape that fear like a little girl captured from an enemy village, was driving him. A total animism of hatred towards forces he did not know, that didn't know him: that was the mind of a soldier.

All he had was his gun, his hands on the gun, his eyes ready to aim down the gun, his feet pumping on the ground and his arms tensed up to hold the gun. His body was ready to spring like a machine wound up by a mechanical coil, all in the effort to use the scant muscles located in his index finger to pull a trigger and let another separate machine do his work for him. Still, he pushed forward, with the goal lying unseen ahead of him, a heart beneath a chest hidden in impermeable darkness. A sight flashed before him.

The death of his quad. The blood leaking from their faces, their chests, their arms and legs. The beaten and dying and dead bodies around him of men lesser than him but greater at the same time. Those he had seen fall in battle, fall to powers much less significant all because Sam's power was a singular occurrence. He was the one, the only one, to wield it that he knew, for he was the only one who could know and communicate the enemy's position and actions in those trying times to his troops before a tragedy occurred. Then another image scrolled his sight, an image with sound, a whispering from behind....

_Wrong way...._ said the voice, and the face before him was unmistakable. **Chalk-white, black cracks of flesh around the rounded eyes, gnarled gums rotted away with slim teeth still hanging down. **The corpse of that steel-eyed child flashed before him, gruesome and chilling, and stopped Sam in his tracks. He stood half-up, still slouched down and gun still gripped in hands, and turned around with a glare of his glasses acting out on his internal emotions of distrust and rage. He turned full around and aimed from the hip. Nothing. No one. Just a stagnant air that he had parted and the dim spores of ferns dancing precariously in the air, hanging without a purpose, not touching anything but the air. Sam huffed and turned around. The darkness had crept up on him from that direction somehow. He couldn't see past a meter from the already dim green light, and his fears conquered him in that second.

"I must be going the wrong way, huh?" Sam said. He turned to where the hallway was lit and calmly walked, his gun held down, his posture erect and almost leisurely. So Sam began walking back on the path he had already cleared, forgetting himself just so much that when he saw a door window he jumped and ducked under it, worried about his lost cover, of all things. He pressed against the door and held himself still. As he glanced back to the hallway he could see the darkness encroaching, surrounding him tighter and tighter. Sam scowled. The darkness was against him! He took the safest route and entered the door, opening it and spinning into the room while slamming the door shut behind him, ready to shoot whatever moved first. Nothing did. He was in another short hallway with doors set against shadow-clad walls. Sam got up and moved in a brisk jog.

"This realm" Sam though aloud "is green. If reason tells me right, green is the most commonly occurring color in any visible spectrum. It's right in the middle of the visible color spectrum, anyway. That tells me that I must be in some kind of middle-ground realm. Some place that's connected just as much as it's disconnected from the rest of....reality?" Sam rested himself against a door and wiped his sweating brow. "This place is confusing me shitless." He glanced down the hall, tried to measure its distance in the darkness, but could not. The darkness had already reached and saturated this hall, everything but the doors...

_I hear typing_ Sam realized. He pressed his ear against the door which he leaned against and listened. Through the thin wooden paneling of the solid frame door he heard a myriad fingers clacking against even more keys than Sam could venture to imagine. He slowly opened the door and stepped into the room. Caution seemed to leave him for a second and his gun was dropped from his hands to the floor. The door was closed behind him, the evil child standing behind it with his big eyes glaring at the dumbstruck Sam. The room he had entered was one beyond his mortal will of understanding. Words escaped him to know what he was looking at, but words formed.

"...fuck" he spoke. "It's a laboratory!" Sam moved forward in hypnotic silence, his gun strap catching onto his fine leather shoe and his gun dragging with him. In the room, some many dimensions wide, in stepping floors that formed a linoleum ziggurat where Sam was at the top, demonic fiends worked in binds and harnesses at consoles with seven rows and twenty columns of keys, all without symbols, typing with long, bony fingers that were seven to each hand. Nightmarish things, these demons. Their heads were bound in leather and attached to their spine-thin necks by metal bolts fastened to a metal collar. Their arms were hewn by the fused, rotted skin to their emaciated torsos where the bone of their ribcages was exposed through the thin membrane of their flesh at their front. Their heads shook against their bondage as their fingers worked automatically, with mechanical swiftness, typing furiously on a screenless terminal.

Sam stepped up to one such demon and saw its head shaking in vain against its restraints. He tapped it and heard it snarl, gurgle and hiss before going back to its regular breathing. Thick metal rings were equipped to each of its fingers, forcing it to type against its will by some ill-conceived demonic magic. Sam walked around, observing all around him. He looked past a terminal and saw an endless, dim aqua-shaded horizon of sharp hills and valleys extending to a thick, misty distance. In the other direction he saw a similar horizon, though he could see where it ended clearly against a jagged row of scaling mountains. And now, for the first time in a time he'd long forgotten to record, he could see the sky.

**Purgatory's sky was filled with painful ghosts,** clouds shaped like tortured faces, crying eyes and screaming mouths, all without the heraldic voice to measure the true depth of their godless torment. All of it was an aqua color, dim and dark with blackness shading the clouds where shadows were appropriate. Sam's mouth fell open in wonder and awe at the sight. He looked around in a hurry for something, anything, to tell him what exactly was happening around him, and in his looking he found that the door he entered from had vanished. Finally, after much neck-whipping, he saw the glow of a screen on the next floor down, a steep slide of about twenty feet. He stomped his feet down and slid down the slope onto the floor, his gun always following, which he caught and equipped for better or worse.

The screen he saw was streaming the numbers that one demon typed, a demon seated before its console, making whining growls in protest to its endless actions. Sam stood behind it and looked up at the screen. Numbers scrolled by, at least twenty at a time on a line, and then a new line started. They passed so rapidly that Sam could barely read them as they were created, so he read the ones already made and searched for a pattern in their sequences. And he found one, almost instantly, that two lines were identical. Surely, as one of those lines left, another below it had a duplicate produced at the bottom of the screen.

_What is it?_ Sam wondered. _That sequence, I feel like I know it. I feel some connection to it...but what the hell is it!?_ Sam resorted to removing his glasses to see if his cosmic insight could aid him in any way. The numbers coiled off the screen in his supreme sight and became double-helix strands that slowly spiraled as more and more numbers were added, forming new links in a spinning chain of sequences all lined in perfect order with each other.

"Oh" Sam said, lowering his glasses again. "It's DNA. Well, that hardly made it fair..." Sam dropped his gun in sudden, shocking revelation. "They're programming life...!?" Sam realized where he was, the significance of the endlessly planed ziggurat, and the true meaning of the lively green. "I'm on the floor where **all life is produced! Where all these things come from!!! I've wandered into the hub of all creation!!!**" At Sam's realization he retrieved his gun, cocked it, pressed the barrel to the demon's head and heard a pleading whine. ".....this is too easy...!"

* * *

Red flew in torrential blurs. Left and right, the battery never stopped. Mort was trapped within the regulations of a thin white band of tape in a perfect circle on the ground, forbidden by arcane stretching of rules from stepping out of it, just as the throwers never stepped beyond their own line. Balls flew with the flashing of bloody colors, and to Mort it seemed like he was trapped amidst a hurricane of blood splattering around him, all the large, uniform droplets that warped in their speed marked somewhere with the word 'Voot', the ball-making company of apparent Purgatory.

Mort's defense was as a leaf to sway in the wind. His wrists were limp but his arms kept firm and powerful. The winds of destiny whipped in sharp tunnels guiding the paths of balls before they were thrown. Their trajectory was carved into the air which through his dark goggles Mort could see. That was his goal. He used his shovels, the Spade of Fate, his aged armament and Agony, a modern strengthened breed, to catch, curve and altogether manipulate fate as he bashed the balls away from his being without ever letting them touch his body. If that happened, he dread to think of the consequence.

_Stay focused_ Mort thought. _Stay serene. Keep your eyes open, your mind ever present. I exist here, in the center of this world, now, to dodge the advances of lethal humanity on all sides. I, the Earth, shall endure the Sky and the Sea and exist as a heaven between them, a nonviolent stand against pure force as it encroaches everywhere..._ Mort's doctrine led him up. He jumped high to avoid twenty balls screaming into each other at once. One flew up at him as he was airborne. He stayed within the circle on the ground, seeing it projected in the air around him, and he sliced the ball apart, taking it from the action of the game, before landing with a smash to the wooden ground to continue his defense. The children shouted in a cacophonous incoherence on all sides, villainizing and degrading Mort's superiority while boosting their own ignorant morale, and the mist on the stands gave them the spirit to fight, even if it was pointless, even if it had no value, because the mist loved each and every one of the half-witted jocks that stood on court.

"You're dead, asshat!" a child shouted.

"You wear an ass for a hat!" another exclaimed in clarification. "Hence your title 'asshat'!"

"What's an old guy like you doing here?" another child shouted. "Are you trying to check us out!?"

"You a pedophile!?" another boy instigated.

"You a scout leader?"

"You a den mother!?"

"My momma don't like me eating pop-sicles..."

The shouting was never-ending, but over the winds of fate nothing penetrated Mort's concentration. He was in an otherworldly place, in a meditative harmony with some preternatural existence, stroking the hair of Tiamat before the time of Marduk's father....then he returned, eyes full of fire, and muscles tensed with the silent prayers of destruction. He stood firm, both shovels tight and straight in his hands. Two balls rammed against the spades but Mort didn't budge. He let them fall, and soon the room had died. Once the last ball bounced back to its line and the boy who scooped it up gave his snicker, Mort moved to the center of his circle and sighed.

"You know" Mort said "your parents aren't really here." This wave of shock shook the faces of all the boys, some more demonically than others, and gnarled, spiked teeth began to pierce through thin lips and gums. "In fact, you're all so worthless, none of them would show up even if they _could._" Mort's strategy succeeded. A boy stepped over his line and ran at Mort with a hell-bending shriek and sharp, green eyes. His face had opened up to a hole of yellow spikes that pierced through his gums. All reason left the irrational lad and turned him into an unsightly monster that screamed towards Mort. Mort slid forward and threw up and arm, smashing the demon on its jaw, closing its round mouth, and sent it off its skinny legs. Then he stabbed into its gut with another step forward, still staying in his line, and spun a stream of green acrylic blood into the air. The demon's body fell limp to the floor and dissolved instantly into a molten plastic pile of dust.

"Why don't you take a step back" Mort said "and throw with less power, more precision..." Mort held his shovels to either side but looked at one end of the court. He was glaring, emotinless save for the fury of defense he put up, as the children sniffled through their flaring nostrils and bit their lips into their nail-sharp fangs.

"Shut up, man!" a boy whined through his sobs. "You don't know shit...." He fell to his knees and wept there, dropping his ball. The rest of the boys seemed to follow suit, sobbing into their arms or into the wall, shouting sobs as they pounded into something solid. Mort looked at the other side. They were more stoic, holding back tears and fighting off their rage, but he saw that they had lost their will to battle any further. He saw that his tactic had won, but he knew the game was still not over. The ash-skinned girls in cheerleader outfits discarded their pompoms and brandished knife-sharp claws on each finger.

"So what?" one of the stoic boys said. "We're here, that's what matters."

"What's the point of being here" another added "if we can't at least smile every once in a while."

"It's always split down the middle" another said, jerking his lip back when he felt a gasp of sadness creep up. "It's always 50-50 between us, when there's just two left, and the rest of us are gone, we don't know what happens. They just disappear, forever. They get to leave! Or they get to die! Either way, they get out of here and more like them come in to take their place! It's never ending!!!" The girls got to the sidelines. Their mouths were filled with razor-sharp fangs. Their anorexic bodies leaned forward and exposed their spines through the limp rags of clothing they wore.

"Sometimes" a young boy in the crowd spoke, "I think it'd be better if we **just stopped living...**" Loss. Game over. The admittance of defeat in their hearts led to their defeat on the court. In their despair, they had opened doors to a greater darkness, and the harvesters of that despair went in to reap. The girls ran to the crowds, and with their claws they began ripping their way through the red, stringy flesh of the boys. Once the slaughter started the boys were dead. The girls swarmed the court and ripped heads from shoulders, eviscerated bodies, opened bellies to let roll out guts. Blood fountained from every stab and sweep their claws made. They bit off necks, whole necks, and spat them back out, giggling loudly and rushing on in a different way to a different kill. The slaughter continued, boys heads being crushed and cut open and various essential organs removed on a whim, until none stood.

**Then the feeding began.** Of the crop they harvested the girls bent to the floor and ate plentifully with loud, voracious gulps. The blood slid down their pale, thin throats and added life to their dead, ashen skin. The black cracks of their chalk-white hide began to bleed and coated over the white, forming a solid layer of red that intertwined with itself to form a muscular structure in its whole. Veins and vessels coiled and wound into their muscles, and then flesh began to grow. It grew spotty at first, leaving many girls who hadn't eaten all they could with still exposed patches of muscles or membranous, thin flesh. Mort watched them complete themselves into things that were more living that not, less ash and now more blood and bestial, yet he couldn't see past that primal animism that had erected their stance so quickly. Even though they had reformed themselves to human beings, Mort only saw demons...

"So this is how the cycle goes" Mort said, loosening his stance. "It's all just a passing facade. Your fragility is the first deceit. Then it goes on, and when others are left defenseless you strengthen yourself from their weakened bodies. You feed from others until you dry out completely again, and then you seek more weaklings to prey on. You're no less than animals. You're heartless, mindless, you have no will of your own! You just feed and kill so that you don't die! Is that what lies in the belly of this beast? Is this the primal drive of all humanity!? **Or is it just you bitches?**" And the girls turned to him, all smiling and batting their lashes, and they let him see their still sharp bladed claws and the flashing metal of their teeth and the wide darkness in all their eyes, and they hissed the same thing together.

_Won't you give in before it's too late?_ Mort glanced across the court. A referee stood, still ashen and frozen, a lifeless husk of dried minerals ready to fall. And then he fell and collapsed into himself with a cough of dust to the air. Mort sheathed his shovels with a sight and drew out Gore, the great destroyer, his chainsaw. He rose up his goggles and glared with his eyes at the myriad pale bodies with muscles still exposed in odd places all, ready to be torn apart by his devilish instrument.

"When has asking" Mort asked "ever truly fallen a man?" Mort revved his chainsaw. "Not a man like you know, but **a World's man! A Real Man! When have you ever had to fight WITH A MAN WHO HATES BITCHES!!!???**" His answer was a roar, a roar from Gore. The roar of the girls sank under that roar, as they all charged together like a quickly-imploding body of stars onto a single, dark point.

No rules in effect. Mort stepped beyond the line....

* * *

With a gnashing of teeth and a ripping of limbs the four-eyed demon spread a galore of gore and wondrous splatter through the halls of the last stretch of the Red realm's hallway. Tom and Yvonne followed after him, outrunning a gathering flood of fatty flesh. The legion of mirthy children smashed into the walls, still only ankle-deep and pudding thick, as it rushed and chased the down. The fervent laughter of their fiendish familiar echoed the halls, and when the two humans looked forward to its trail of destruction they saw only blood and body parts in his wake. No traces of demons to make them anymore. The screams were brief and died instantly to his power. The ultimate monster tore his way down the hall to the wide, double-doors where under collected a thin mist of enigmatic veiling.

"Haha!" the demon laughed. "Just there! Just nearly there!!!"

"Where?" Tom asked. The demon punched his arm into a drinking fountain and ripped it through the wall. A hideous scream echoed, like a girl being gutted alive and forced to watch, as the wires of water bled clear liquid in a spray all over the walls and the floor. The demon heaved the heavy object, wall still attached, over his head, lurched forward and threw it through the doors. Then he stomped his way over to the thick, disgusting mud of living flesh and began to stomp at it. It stuck to his skin but he pulled away and collected blood on his feet with every furious stomp.

"You cannot win" a graveled, demonic voice said. A malformed head of a pudgy, evil little chile with wide, white eyes against crusted black lids started to rise up like a snake of fog from the thick muck of flesh, and around its bulging shaft of a neck tiny, nubby arms with tiny, pudgy fingers grew as well. "We are many, we are strong. We-" the demon punched the face into a bloody, chunky splatter on the wall. The rest of the muck gathered itself into a wave and crashed against the wall with a collective 'punch' as the demon dodged. He hopped with frantic, panting laughter and a firmly held grin of madness.

"Keep going!" he shouted. "I'll hold this off!"

"Have fun!" Tom called.

"Wait!" Yvonne called. Tom pulled her along and she ran with him, but she looked over her shoulder as much as she could, watching her monster fight. He punched blood away from the legion's body as it twisted and wrought its way together, forming hands from the flesh and pudgy fat of many to attack one. That one took all his chances, stabbed with his sharp nails every eye, pulled a tooth from every exposed and hissing mouth, all while dodging the advance of the blubbery mass.

"Come on!" he shouted. He was hit full force but not blown away, as the flesh started to gather on him and dissolve him and devour him. "**CMON! REALLY FIGHT ME!!!**"

"NOOO!!!" Yvonne screamed. She and Tom stepped through the threshold of the next realm. She could still see his four eyes flashing murder and his grin shining bright homicide. Only in her mind, but she could see it. Superimposed onto that image of her faithful fiendish compatriot, she could see him from the past she had only recently accepted, the man who awakened the inhuman craving of carnal pleasures within her, and bestowed on her the nymphomaniac tendencies she always thought were a product of being in power. She felt like mourning, but the vindication of once again seeing the villain of her past forced into torture sedated her wrath, and her emotions balanced into the former, dutious soldier that sought an end to her mission.

"Where are we?" Yvonne asked.

"Shit" Tom said. "That's where we are: in the deep end of a river of shit. I need to rest. I need to think....check ammo, guns, grenades. Shit, I'm out of grenades!" Yvonne pressed her hand to Tom's face and turned him her way. She glared into his worried eyes and forced him to close them with a calm sigh. They rested against the hallway wall, making sure their backs were together more than they were exposed to the wall, and they calmly breathed.

"So where are we?" Yvonne once again asked.

"Not sure" Tom said. "If that last place was the realm of Carnal Pleasures, or whatever, then we have to figure out why it was red."

"Red?" Yvonne asked.

"The color of that floor" Tom said "must have something to do with the color of _this_ floor as well, right?"

"That makes sense" Yvonne said. "But then, every single floor like this would have some kind of single color scheme, wouldn't it?"

"That's right" Tom said. "The colors, presumably seven, can all associate with different aspects of life, including psychology. Red is the color of blood, which is its connecting to the body and carnal things. It's also a royal color, a powerful color, because it's the color of blood. That would explain the super-strong demon's on that floor. So, what about orange. What does orange represent in the human body?"

"I can't think of anything" Yvonne said. "Some people have orange hair, but neither of us do."

"We can assume" Tom said "that not being ginger _could _make us vulnerable to a death-trap here or there. It's a possibility."

"Or that this is where all gingers go" Yvonne added. "In which case, we're in for some ugly fights." Tom nodded. He couldn't take her humor in its proper light, not that she was being humorous at all....

"Orange instigates hostility" Tom said. "I read that....somewhere. It's color psychology."

"Right" Yvonne said. "Go on. If it's hostility, what does that mean?"

"....aggression" Tom said. "Violence. This has to be a floor associated with hostility and what gets provoked of it. If red is lust for carnal creations, orange is anger, so let's be calm and proceed into **the Realm of Wrath.**"

"No" Yvonne said. Tom looked at her curiously. She was glaring and waving her hand in jerking motions to stop him from going on. "No stupid names. Let's just go." Tom sighed and drew his sword. Yvonne took out her bat. They'd both found guns to be less reliable than they wanted them to be.

After walking past several turns, Tom and Yvonne finally were forced to decide on their direction. Yvonne wasted no time. Upon stopping she chose right and walked that way. Tom followed her, glancing left as he walked into the intersection, then back the way they came. They continued walking through the orange-lit halls until another inopportune turn presented itself. Yvonne went left this time, as did Tom. They were forced to decide once more and Tom led them right, which Yvonne followed. Yvonne took the next available left and Tom went with her. They reached a dead end. When the turned the same dead-end repeated.

And now they were trapped.

"What the fuck!?" Tom exclaimed. "Is this a trick!?"

"It's possible" Yvonne said as she palmed the wall "that there aren't any regular demons here. Maybe its' just....walls?"

"That could be" Tom said. "It's all likely that these walls _are_ demons, but if there's any validity to that it means that we can kill them." Tom took his sword and prepared to stab the wall, with the intent on wounding it somehow, but his arm was caught on the back-draw by Yvonne.

"There's a door" she said. "We should take it before we do anything else."

"Right" Tom said. "If it leads us back into this room, somehow, we start killing the walls."

"Fine" Yvonne agreed. She walked out of the door and back into a winding, labyrinthine hallway. More turns bent down and vanished into a thin fog of confusion. Tom stepped out as well and they decided to proceed by going to the right. The maddening did not stop for them any time soon. After too many sudden turns and the exiting of many identical dead-end halls, Tom and Yvonne fell to their knees, their spirits broken, in the middle of the hall.

"It's impossible!" Yvonne shouted. "What are we trying to do!?"

"I don't know!" Tom roared. "Damn this shit! What are we supposed to do!?" At their cries the universe replied and sent the wall before them crashing down in a pile of ruin and rubble. Yvonne shrieked and Tom rose up for action. A cloud of white dust entered the orange of the hall and the loud hissing fall of rain sounded from out of the newly created portcullis. Yvonne crawled away and opened her eyes as the humid air cleared the dust from her view.

**There stood Four-Eyes, the Demon,** a victorious smile on his blood-splattered face. The flesh of his left arm had been ripped off in some unseen struggle and his musculature, raw and hard and dripping with fresh blood, was exposed. He treated it neutrally, without recognition to its pain, and took the hand to the wall. Colors swirled in from the white bricks that were drained black. He was a demon of Purgatory, as much a part of it as he didn't want to be, and so **he used the walls to reassemble his flesh, taking from the life stream of the unending realm.** Lightning flashed. The walls were slowly repaired, brick by brick, as bony claws raked in the clutter and debris the demon had knocked down. Tom lowered his guard and sheathed his sword, noticing first the demon's newly acquired pants.

* * *

"Finally" Tom said. "You're clothed." The demon aided Yvonne up and took her shaking hand into his.

"You're alright" he said with a grin and a glimmer four fold. "Don't worry at all. I'm here now. I promised to help you if you freed me, and I shall never go back on that word. You have given me my power back, girl. I'm yours." Yvonne's fear lifted. The image of the rapist that haunted her vanished, and now only the four eyes of this vicious fiend were set in her mind, the vision of her familiar, her _new_ aid in this war. She grinned.

"Help us out of here" Yvonne pleaded. "We're lost in this realm of hostility and anger..."

"Hostility?" the demon said, sniffing the air. "Anger? Here? No! This is the Realm of the Unknown! This is **Subconscious Purgatory!**"

"Huh?" Tom grunted. The demon turned to him and glared him down. He obviously wasn't talking to him, but he continued for Yvonne.

"This is the realm where all men go who submit to the darker caverns of their mind. Where a man who had the vain attempts to pierce through the actions of his humanity is trapped to wander forever, no purpose, no life, as a shell of his former insane self. This is where the animals go, men who have eliminated their consciousness and the border of their deeper, unknown nature, to become animals, murderers acting on a whim of subconscious desire. This is where the ethics of being human **come to die.**"

"How do you know?" Yvonne asked.

"As a demon" he began "I have endured some torment on each level of Purgatory. I met my end in the Carnal area where I was caught and tortured as you found me. I entered through the more pristine blue realm from Limbo, where demons just wander to find why they're here, and nearly got lost outside to become one of the soulless wanderers standing forever in the rain, but eventually I found my way down and down...."

"How do we clear this realm?" Tom asked. "Obviously, the trick lies in the subconscious, but I have no idea how to separate that out from the rest of my mind."

"**Shut up"** the demon ordered. "All you have to do is follow, _not talk_, and I'll take you to the conjunction area with Limbo, where you belong."

"Thank you" Yvonne said. She hugged the demon's thick, hard waist of muscles. His grin widened as he placed his heavy palms to her back and his eyes started to glow. Tom became uneasy at his apparent transformation. She drew away and offered him the lead. The demon kept in pace with Yvonne behind him and Tom followed, unwanted by the bulky fiend.

"Don't get too trusting" Tom whispered to Yvonne. "This guy might try to kill one of us."

"He's sworn to me" Yvonne said "but I'll make sure he doesn't try anything to you. Just trust me." Tom nodded. He did trust her. He trusted her powers of control just as much as he trusted his own wicked abilities of control. He tested them out of sight, bending his fingers in impossible ways, feeling only the natural dexterity of his fingernails touching while wrapping around his wrist in his mind. In the end, his greatest power was of trust as the demon took random, untraceable turns through the ever-changing, living labyrinth of **the unconscious Purgatory....**


	77. An Anomaly between Life and Death

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

After some effort to free up a seat Sam managed to pry the dried demon husk from its sadistic bindings and threw it down to the floor where its fingers continued clacking rapidly in a rapid, seizured manner. Sam stood behind the console of unmarked keys and tried using his superior eyes to read them. He only saw a solid slab of black and carefully moved his hand down to press where he thought a key was. The blackness lit up around his hand, coiling and twisting around the nearby tip of his finger as if the arcane magics were attracted to his living heat.

The twisting bands and streams of light forked their way around into unreadable shapes as Sam pressed his finger down harder, and when he typed the key he saw an evil face glaring up at him, sketched from the glowing bands of light and the natural darkness they emanated from. Sam withdrew his finger, moved it to the side a distance, and pressed down another black key. The same thing happened, but the bands of light this time formed a demonic face with an open mouth and eyes curved down in great lament.

_I doubt this is what they were seeing_ Sam thought _but it seems that the demon's personality is created in part through this set-up. _He realized that, even if he spoke aloud, there was no one around to take what he said in any kind of informative way. There were only the bound demons at their terminals, typing uncontrollably and furiously as the message of a defect in the system had reached far out already.

"So if I can find all the keys" Sam explained as he thought through his mouth "that have the similar emotions I can theoretically create a demonic individual made entirely of sadness or happiness or anger or evil and let it go out as it pleases. That could be a very prudent, strategic move...or something horrible and the worst decision I've ever made while being utterly lost in this godless place..." Sam thought for a moment as he sat in the swivel chair seat and folded his shaded glasses into his breast pocket. He cracked his knuckles and rolled his head with a great many light cracks snapping off from his adjusted joints. His fingers were already set at some random keys which the lights gathered around in moving, amorphous blobs of light from the contact, waiting to be pressed before forming wholly. Sam finished thinking and sat for a moment in calm and stoic silence.

With a kick he sent away the chair and it fell over the wispy corpse behind him. He drew out a gun and aimed it down at the panel of keys, glancing up for a moment to see the uneven bulges in the DNA model that was above him, a single part of a greater life. Then he looked back down and pulled the trigger. His eyes saw how the smoke curled around the barrel, and he saw how the bullet spiraled through the air and how its metal sharded off in such liquid movements as he watched at nearly a million frames-per-second in perceived, warped time. His amazingly powerful eyes witnessed the same event more than once, to his uncertainty, and when his human body caught up to what he witnessed the panel was already breaking in its own structure and shooting off arcing sparks. Sam slowly drew his head up to behind what he had done to the building structures of life that came from the code of the computer.

He saw a great distance, into a hallway somewhere in the building. It was in Limbo, not that he knew the exact difference at the time. The stagnant and silent darkness began moving as a whole and worried little demon child sprang out from the wall. He started walking with a protective slouch and picked at his finger nails as he walked. His one big, bugging eye looked around frantically and even bulged out and curled back around his tiny head to watch his back while his other, normal eye was wide open and curled up with great distress. He walked for a distance and stopped, startled by some noise. His called to the hall, something like 'Hello?' from Sam's ability to read lips, and looked around with his grotesque eye some more.

Something moved in the wall, a shadow cast by something within. Sam could only see it as a glance but the boy didn't notice it at all. Then, the glancing shadow raced down the opposite wall of the same hallway, and this time the child caught sight of it and followed it into the distant darkness. The boy called again, then ended with his mouth trailing off into a whimper. That shadow reappeared, and Sam's eyes locked onto it. He wouldn't let it run from his sight again. The shadow built up bigger and thicker and darker on the surface of the wall as it seemed to be approaching the bordering threshold of reality and not.

The boy spied it as his eye bulged out around his head and curled up over his frayed hair. The shadow extended a limb from the wall. It was no human appendage, not even one to be though of in so much as a passing glance as remotely humane. It was a long, fleshy stick with an enormous metallic end with a wavy blade and a long, piercing tip. The whole foot was flat and razor-sharp as it led a cutting glare of light when it stepped as it cut through the air. The boy backed himself against the opposite wall and attempted to retreat into it but the leg was fast. In Sam's human-speed vision he barely saw it move and it had already stuck the boy onto it. With the boy bleeding acryllics the leg quickly snapped around in all directions, painting the walls and ceiling with the boy's blood before finally pulling him back into the wall which started to bleed through the thin membrane of reality that the shadow-monster hid behind.

Then all was calm. The blood solidified into a raspberry wax streaking down the clean blue brick-layered plaster of the wall. The shadow reappeared suddenly on the other side of the hallway and stepped out from the wall with another stick-thin leg covered with excessive, closely wrought skin like bark. On this leg was a bird-like foot bent backwards with soft, wiggling talons at its ends. Using that foot the beast crawled out from the wall in its fullest form, the wretched metal blade leg following as its second support and three stubby, thick arms on its under belly that press on the floor to keep it up. It was a fleshy mess of swollen skin and hanging sacks that pulsed irregularly that stomped its way across the floor with a mute lowing which shook the tiles. From within the flesh something parted its way out, **a starch-white long-snouted deer's skull and lower jaw equipped with long, gnarled fangs.** This was its head that opened up into a dark, tunneling hole that seemed to snake around and pulse with some forbidden, dark color of its innards.....

Sam finally blinked and lost his connection with his far sight and saw the creation of is wrathful force against an otherwise arcane creation. The DNA strand that one was was now a string of code while double-helixed bands spiraled across the screen above the constantly breaking, crackling, spark-spitting console. He put his glasses back on with a sigh and turned around. The demons around him were all stopped in their work and their screens were black. Sam moved over to one of them to see the effects of his apparent sabatoge as it had been transferred to the semi-living inhabitants of the realm and found that the demons were all dead. Their mouths all hung open and their heads rested backwards while their long, clawed fingers were folded on their bound chests.

"Some sort of failsafe?" Sam wondered. "Maybe I made something so horrible that they need to cut off its food source?"

"That's right" a childish voice said. "Thank you so much." Sam whipped around in an instant and fired a shot. He and the smoke of his gun and the bullet in the air froze for a moment while reality around him broke down and restructured with a hiss of static and crackling visual fuzz. When it stopped his bullet hit the linoleum of the floor and his head snapped up along with his gun to aim at the darkness down the hall. He glanced at his surroundings for a split second and saw that everything was made of tile. He stood on wider tiles that those that bordered the walls but the widest still were on the ceiling, paneled with only small slits cut between them for light to leak through and give everything a cavernous, oceanic green-blue tone.

"Where are we?" Sam asked, raising his gun up. The child stepped through the darkness, his smile ever wide and his eyes glaring as wide as they could right at Sam.

"Oh, that's not good" the child said. "**Ask me something original. I don't want to answer cliches!**" His smile grew and shook something in Sam, something that controlled his ease. Sam felt his finger tighten around the trigger suddenly, unconsciously preparing him for battle. His tension was visible even through his dapper black suit. Now Sam faced down the final boss, having skipped ahead of all the other contenders who continued fighting their way through an unknown stretch of labyrinthine halls and rooms holding horde after horde of terrible demons and monsters.....

* * *

Meanwhile, in a quickly blood-filling basketball court, Mort slaughtered his way through the slew of mad girls made of partial flesh and muscle who all wanted to rake him apart with their thick, metal claws and gnash apart his tough, black skin with their nail-thin teeth. He tore through them like the ashen, fragile dolls they were with the might of Gore in his hands, screaming and roaring all the way as blood covered him from head to foot. Everything was drowned out in the violent monster's roar as the mass of fleshy girls came his way, all leading themselves to a premature death.

"**RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!"** Mort jerked his blade right and obliterated a girl's head into a thick, bloody mess that sprayed in a high arc over more heads and bodies. He then swung his blade to the left with both hands, powering the tearing blade through four bodies, separating heads from torsos by a terrible, loud rending of their sternums in half. He thrust his blade threw a girl until her body folded down along the chain. Her hair caught on the chain and her head was pulled through the hole in her chest where the blade stuck through. Her face was carved in half and the two parts of her head were thrown away behind her very back. Mort made a stomping kick randomly to the side to shove away one of the rushing girls that neared him.

Despite his best fighting efforts, his back was always exposed, but the winds of fate were still on his side. He felt the glancing breeze generated by the army of bodies behind him and quickly slashed his powerful chainsaw in a full circle, tearing a girl apart in her mid-pounce. Her upper half flew past him and made a conscious swipe before drifting too far away and into the rear line that continued to encroach with the rest of the crowd.

"I can take you all on like this" Mort said. "This weapon has ended greater lives than you know!!!" Mort's call was deafened by the very roar of his monster weapon, so the girls continued to rush in with their long, evil claws and fangs armed against him. Mort shook off the fear they generated, all their hideous, wide glaring eyes and silken shadows of black hair flowing behind them, and saw only a mess of demons wearing incomplete human skins which he tore through with the emphatic murderous drive of a soldier fighting his way through the enemy's front lines for little more than a little war glory. He fought for his life with a lifeless abandon and in his fits of madness and rage he swung his chainsaw with only one steady arm, slicing apart the horrible maidens with utter wreckless abandon of style or willful direction.

In all his blind raging he failed to notice the adaptive qualities of these terrible demons and was cut by their claws. He looked down at the pain and saw a girl who had sunk her razor fangs into Mort's boot and pierced through to bite his foot, drawing blood that she ravenously licked away with a long, slender tongue and a erratic twitching of her uprolled eyes. Mort kicked her up, seeing how she was only half of a full body, and was attacked yet again. She shot out her long, tube-ended tongue and stuck it into his thick forearm.

"Grrrr!" Mort growled. He yanked the girl in and backhanded her with the same arm she had latched onto, then tore the tip of his chainsaw through the back of her skull as she was thrown away. After carefully seeing to his wounds and spotting the blood start to drip out from his boots and leak down his arm in a steady stream, Mort felt the sting of his humanity return and a sickness overcame him. Gore hummed down as Mort placed it down to the ground to hold his stomach in a lurching, painful position. The girls had stopped their advance to stare down at him and giggle in unison. Mort gasped and breathed hard and heavily, trying to readjust himself to the now unfamiliar pangs of feeling that he lost in the roar of his chainsaw. Suddenly, the pain surfaced up from his throat and he was forced to a retching and vomiting curl. Once it was over Mort sighed and spat out the last lingering acidic saliva still in his mouth.

"Haaah" he sighed. He stood up and kicked Gore off. His body was still shining with the coat of foreign blood covering and oozing off of him. He wiped away the lingering spit around his lips with a swipe of his strong arm and swung the tickling blood off of his skin as well. "This is it, is it? Nothing but a constant onslaught without terms to establish an overzealous berserk from a tactical charge? Is this the extent of your unearhtly powers?" Mort looked around. The girls were just smiling at him and waiting, biding their time as he talked at them, ready to pounce at any moment when his guard seemed to be lacking. Mort began a laugh but the feeling left him. The sheer number he was up against finally revealed itself now that the spray of blood and ground organs wasn't obstructing his view, and he saw that he was truly cast in a hopeless light.

He saw the blood moving together on the floor and from that mound of gore rose up a new, perky, vigorous individual with sharper claws and longer fangs and a faster shaking blur of her face as her demonic neck jerked in an erratic seizure. Mort grinned but only huffed hard breaths and began a growling animal low as he lowered his head and took in breath through his grit teeth. He sucked in a breath of air and leaned back with his head swung suddenly upwards. Then he roared, and his voice shook the winds of fate and the winds of reality.

"**!!!!!!"** His monstrous shout echoed through the room and blew a mighty gale around, stirring up all the blood and shattering the glass of the basketball hoop frames. Mort stomped his foot and swept his arm across a girl's face, shattering her head in an instant. He then rose up his back leg and delivered a flat kick to the girl's chest, blowing the rest of her body into bloody mist as his fingers wrung together and the veins in his forehead pulsed themselves visible beneath his dark skin. **"COME OOON!!!!"** he demanded. The girls were still standing still, emotionless faces all, watching as Mort invited himself to break them all apart. He grabbed one by the head and broke her legs with a swift kick to her shins. Once on her knees he bent her over and broke her back in half. He gripped a throat so hard that it collapsed into itself and the girl fell over choking on her own blood.

One girl tried to fight back with a quick swipe of her claws. Mort caught her slender forearm and yanked it out of its shoulder. Now he had a new weapon to kill her with and raked her face to ribbons with her own detached arm. The visceral carnage continued with Mort simply overpowering the now frightened and defensive girls while stomping and shouting and sending out pulses of existential energy that rippled through the air of both reality and of fate to crack the paint of the walls and the skin that the girls all wore. They were so reluctant to regenerate from their bloody pool that they attempted to crawl away as red puddles, but even then Mort's roars managed to reach and injure them in their liquid state and their blood bled.

Finally the floor was clear. Mort let out a shivering groan as he popped his neck to the side. Then he bobbed his neck forward and let out a huff of satisfaction. "Can't play my games, little girls. Go home." He deactivated Gore and sheathed the beastly weapon back on his back. His shook his body with the loud metallic shaking of the implements on his back to get the splatter of bloodshed off of him. He then resorted to wiping his face clean with his palms that he had dried against the flesh and hair of the girls he slaughtered and took off his goggles to manage them a little better.

"They may as well be broken, right?" Mort said as he flexed their usually taught metal structure. "Shit...." Mort was ready to go into a more detailed string of curses but when he looked up he saw an amazing sight. **The winds. Even without his goggles, within his mind he had awoken the power to see the guiding winds of fate as they twisted and turned eternally in the air.** Mort was speechless. Automatically, he followed those sacred winds and saw them all flowing in one direction, into the fractured glass panel in front of the great crayon caricature hanging high on the wall of records. The cracks in the glass lengthened and deepened, and then the distant and hollow groaning of a monster flowed out in a breath of wind.

".....uh oh" Mort said. In driving away an army, he feared that he had awakened something far more dangerous....Possibly overtime?

* * *

A hallway was covered with ash that leaked light blood. A hideous phantom stalked away from the carnage, standing at the full height of a man with strong arms holding the silken hair of two dead girls. All its body was surrounded by the shadows of the light and a wide, long, billowing cloak that rose from the floor as a moving ruffle of flame-like movements. The creature turned its head, which ended in a sharp point of a hood, and snarled an exposed row of compact, incising teeth down the hall.

Nny met that glare with a flat and innocent look, pursing his lips and awing at the creature silently. The thing threw down the heads in its hands, turned to Nny in its shadows, and glared the distant man down. Nny could only see the ends of its billowing garb as they stretched out into the light and remarked silently on its flesh color.

"Hi" Nny greeted. The monster hissed and turned away, dragging its cloak after it, and vanished around the corner. Nny shrugged and spun knives in his fingers out of boredom. "Well, I'm still lost. May as well find more of those skinny bitches to kill...." And so the homicidal monster paced down the hallway whistling the jingle to a commercial he had recalled briefly from his human memories long ago lost to the cosmos.

It was about powdered dog food.

Meanwhile, where something important was happening, Yvonne and Tom were led by the four-eyed demon through the realm of the purgatorial subconscious. Yvonne was fearful of her surroundings, of the living walls that closed out paths behind them silently and drained the light from behind with each movement. She was faithful and trusting of her demon consort, however. His muscular, athletic frame gave her the confidence enough in pure physical ability to defend her against the legions of dread all around them. Tom was on guard, despite the guard he traveled with, and continued to flex his powers as much as he could, testing out all the new movements his body was capable of.

He could lengthen his arms by stretching the stringy fibers of his muscles without feeling any kind of pain from it. The bones remained roughly in place, still attached to the ligaments of muscle, and still provided some pivotal weight to his movements. He could do the same with ins fingers and lengthen his overall reach by a significant amount, at least doubling the length of his arm overall, but kept his practice out of view from Yvonne for the sake of keeping her sane. After seeing how she broke down to learning the truth about her past, he didn't want to run any risk of setting her off again. Four-Eyes led both of them to a wall which he ushered them to step away from.

"Gird your minds" he said. "Once we act out against the will of this floor, we'll be subject to its attacks."

"Attacks?" Tom repeated.

"Mental attacks" he said. "This is the realm of the Subconscious. It attacks you in such a way that you can't help be vulnerable to. It's a perfect attack without any possible guard to put up, enticing you to take a wrong turn or forcing you away from the right direction to trap you here forever."

"How can we gird ourselves, then?" Yvonne asked.

"You're strong" the demon said as he would back a punch and the leading step-in for it. "You'll figure it out somehow, I think...." Yvonne grabbed for her stringy hair and started twirling it nervously around her fingers. The demon stomped forward and followed through with a powerful punch into and through the wall. The bricks were blown down and away, and from the inside of the wall a living hissing sound came out. Four-Eyes silently bade for them both to follow close behind and they were off again. Yvonne noticed a strange presence around her now, coming from all the walls and floors around her. Tom felt it as well as an intimidating enemy force stalking him.

"How much further?" Tom asked.

"Just stick close" Four-Eyes said. "I won't be influence by it since I'm already a demon and a part of Purgatory, but you two can lose your minds quickly. I'll remain real no matter what, so just focus on my body and I'll get you out of here and back to safety."

"Wait" Tom demanded. "We can't leave here yet. We have a mission. We have to kill....something here."

"Something?" Four-Eyes said. "You don't know what your searching for at all, but you're adamant to search for it regardless. Is that right?"

"Of course!" Tom said. "If we can't complete this mission....well, perhaps it would just be better to stick around until the end no matter what. I don't want to think about the punishment for abandoning a mission, let alone losing one."

"Huuu" Yvonne shuddered with a violent shaking. "Let's stop talking. I'm feeling dizzy."

"That's the start" Four-Eyes said. "Just focus on me, no matter what." Yvonne nodded and gripped onto his pants. Tom walked forward and tried to do the same, but his depth perception had been warped greatly and no matter how close he seemed to stand he couldn't touch the rear of the demon's garb. He tried to grab Yvonne's shoulder, but after reaching for it her head whipped around and **her eyes were wide, empty black spots with a demonic grin of cracked, black skin underneath.** Tom realized he was deep within an illusion and just kept walking forward. His body had fallen back a few steps from the real body he followed intently, and now his visions swam in a sea of uncertainty and strangeness. Every shape he saw was wrong and sickening, but he remained steadfast and pushed against the impeding, invading mental force.

Yvonne had the same torturous symptoms. When she looked back at Tom whose arm was loosely swinging to grab with her she saw him as a shaking, demonic ghoul with a distended jaw and a fleshy webbing keeping his cheeks up as he shuffled toe-footed after her. Her subconscious was under attack, directing much of its force away from her senses and into her libido, draining her sense and forcing her to walk in a weakened stagger as she sweat and her mouth over moistened.

_Oh shit_ she thought. _This is the absolute worst thing to happen, isn't it? I can't help these feelings at all anymore. I know I was attracted to the demon, or at least pulled to him out of some traumatic bond from when he raped me, but this is absurd. I feel like I'm leaking through my pants. God, I can feel it dripping down my legs already!_ Yvonne looked down in a panic, just a glance while keeping her hand tightly gripped into the waist of her demon guide's pants, and saw her own naked flesh. The illusion had somehow brought her to a shameful naked state and aroused her body into a brain-powered, endorphin-drowned state of sexual stimulation. An immaculate, perpetual orgasm overcame her and her knees weakened. She was barely walking, hanging by the waist of the demon's loose pants.

He, totally unaffected, simply held his pants up and led Yvonne through the halls. He glanced back for a moment to make sure Tom was still nearby and saw him reaching out with both hands, his eyes cast over with a hazy orange coating of illusion. He was still following, thankfully, and Four-Eyes did not complain. He just walked stoically forward with a moaning girl gripping at the empty space between her legs hanging lazily off of his waist and an ardent boy walking after him blinded by the haze of his own mind.

Tom's illusion continued by transforming the floor he walked on into a solid, writhing mass of snakes and serpents. Tom just glowered and walked through them, though they coiled around his legs and seemed to weigh him down. He pressed forward powerfully, ignoring their imaginary weight and their obvious significance to his own hidden mind. Then the sounds began, and he felt a hand at his shoulder.

"We should talk, Tom" spoke the voice of the assassin Tom refused to glance at. He shrugged his shoulder forward and felt something coiling around his stomach. A great, thick serpent's body was wrapping itself around him, pulling him back even as he advanced. "We should stop here and talk about this, Tom" he spoke again. Tom refused to answer it, an illusion out of his own mind that filled him with hate. "Tom...stop walking." Tom ignored it.

A human figure attached to the snake skin coiled up around and grabbed Tom by the stretchy underarmor collar of his suit, hissing through the loose strips of cloth around its face with fierce, angry snake-eyes glaring deep into Tom's. _**"**_**DAMN YOU!!!**" Jormungandr roared. "**May you fester and die in this place, Thomas! I shall see you in Hell, where the both of us truly belong! You fiend! You bastard! YOU FAKE!!!**" Jormungandr vanished into a thick, black smoke around Tom. His face was even more stoic than before as he had ignored the entirety of events in favor of envisioning what games he would play when he returns to the living world again.

Yvonne's sexual torture continued as she was subjugated to walking on a plush carpet floor and bombarded on all sides by the sensual smell of bodily sweat that came from the walls. From out of the darkness of her own shadow which trailed her moisture some nefarious force began building, and moving at her speed was a gathering of writhing, twisting, slimy **tentacles. Rape was imminent.**

_Just take it_ she thought as he mouth fell open and her tongue drooped out, dripping with hot and heavy saliva. _Just endure it. I've endured things like this before....though never this bad. Never this intense. It's mind-numbing. I'm getting fucked crazy from every angle!_ She closed her mouth just in time for a tentacle to come up from underneath her and prod at her lips for entry. _I can get through this....even this demon knows that I can take much worse punishment for less...or does he?_ Yvonne's nightmares began to lessen, just as Tom's had, for her mind was overcoming them. Not only that but her body was overpowering them. The tentacles flew out from between her legs and whipped around as if in the spastic motions of their death. Her heavy pants were replaced by a calm and controlled breathing through her nose and her mouth lost most of its moisture as she swallowed it away.

_It's nothing to me_ Yvonne thought. _Compared to the things I didn't know....this suffering is nothing._ With that in mind Yvonne had conquered her illusion and tamed it. Now the walls moaned for her, with her, and her power activated. From within her deep, locked-away subconscious Yvonne realized her hidden gift at last and grinned nefariously, biting a nail in excitement. _It's nothing to me....I'm a master, after all. **A master of the sexual mind!!!**_

In Yvonne's mind a power had awakened. How it could be used, she did not yet know, but she knew at last that it was there.....And it wanted her to use it. It was a pervy manifestation indeed.


	78. The stretchmarks of imagination

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

The accidental summon could not be stopped! The winds of fate converged and breathed life into a long-dead soul, bringing it into the world of frozen life once again from behind the mysterious barrier it had been sealed. Mort couldn't help but feel responsible for it was his powerful presence that broke the glass enough for the realm of Purgatory itself to resurrect one of its old and, apparently, revered demons.

"Shit in ten buckets" Mort cursed. "If this thing is anything like I suspect it to be I'll need to escape." Mort looked back to the end of the room. Along the wall, but on the opposite side entered from, was another double-door exit. The pale-blue spectator mist was moving through it as well, all the illusions single-file as they left the game that had been long over. Mort grinned and ran for the door, keeping whatever demonic presence there was still to spawn behind him. The glass buckled from behind and then shattered with a roaring rush of wind. Mort dared not to look back.

He heard something piercing through the air with incredible speed, aimed at his head. He stomped his feet to a stop and leaned far back, his entire body led up by a straightened leg held at a constantly descending acute angle to the floor. Something hit the floor where his head would have been had he continued running and left a crater which the dusty air spun away from slowly. Mort let himself fall back and rolled over his back and back to his feet in a low crouch with his fingertips on the ground, like a sprinter prepared to dash off. And like a sprinter, the second he heard the gunshot sound of whatever tried to hit him rebounding against another solid surface, he was off!

His powerful mahogany legs pumped along with his thick, strong arms as he carried his whole body forward and into the mist. He was slowed down drastically by the spiritual thickness of the bizarre living fog and was slowly pushed from it as well. It hung on his skin in wispy remnants that he had to shake off, then trailed away and blew out of the doors at last. Before Mort could get himself out of harm's way the doors were slammed shut and locked. The lights of the gymnasium were dimmed and began to flicker. Mort slammed his back against the metal push-bar of the door in a vain attempt to open it once more, then surrendered and unsheathed a shovel. The lights continued to flicker, and in the flashes of light Mort could see things moving. **Those girls, ash bodies, blinked in and out of existence with the lights, hanging in the air with their limp hands and heads twitching madly.**

_Ah shit_ Mort thought. _Them again. When will these little bitches learn?_ Mort felt something evil behind him. He turned his head and caught sight of many eyes arranged in a thick pool of blood and organs resembling a heavy pasta sauce warmed from a can. _Wait. These are different bitches, aren't they? Those girls. They must be Purgatory's security system of sorts. They appear wherever they please, however, and can multiply themselves infinitely in order to quell any potential problems that arise in this place....but they're weak. They exist more to report and halt any inappropriate actions until another, stronger symbol of justice in this godless system can come along and deal with it outright...._

"That begs the question" Mort began "where are those higher powers if so many guards have to be here now!?" Mort equipped his black goggles once more to see through the inconsequential physical representation of darkness. He saw Purgatory as it was when there was light and witnessed the girls imploding and exploding into and out of existence, carrying their shaky ash-colored bodies through the air to live and cease at will. He slowly walked forward and back onto the main floor where girls were all around him. They ignored him and all centered themselves on some greater problem which stood in the only remaining spot-lit area. A tall tree-like creature with huge ripe fruit in its branches. That's what Mort saw, but what was real was vastly different against what the winds of fate blew.

"You wanna play?" a young man's voice called out. "A'ight, we gonna play then!" Mort heard something above all the dim chaos and meaningless noise of dead girls hissing. He heard something that he hadn't heard since he was a child. Something so innocent and uncorrupted by his life of general malcontent that his mouth dropped open the moment he heard it. His mind drifted back to his boyish memories in the inner city, a short boy when most others were tall, when he would stand on the other side of a wire fence around a court and watch the older, taller, bigger kids play basketball.

That's what he heard. **The dribbling of a basketball.** It stopped for a second, then the air whipped. A girl shrieked and hit the wall, turning immediately into crushed ashes. Mort was barely able to follow them. Once one shrieked a muffled explosion of their bodies against the wall soon followed, all joined together by the bouncing of a ball. Mort steadied his vision in the center of the crowd, where all the girls hovered toward and aimed at, but just as his sight adjusted a body hit him and exploded against him in a cloud of human dust. Mort's goggles were blinded by the material and he negated his feelings of awe while he took to an old-man grumbling as he removed and cleaned off his goggles.

"Bullshit is what it is" Mort complained. "Something starts happening for me and I can't even see it. Damn place is against me. All Purgatory is against me, isn't it?" Once he was free of ashes again he looked and the lights became steady and bright again. He removed his goggles therefore and saw, all around him, **the girls were dead and coated the walls.** The ashes didn't move. They either hung near the walls or stuck to the walls in a thick coating of ash and dirt. Mort shrugged and walked forward to the tree-creature, no longer a creature but still somehow a tree. **A tall young black man, that's what Mort saw, **spinning a basketball on the tip of his long finger with a smile across his young and boyish face. He was dressed all in white clothes, a loose jersey, shorts and court-approved sneakers, and his head shined with a bumpy shave that mimicked the ball he spun so masterfully.

"Well done" Mort said as he drew out his shovel, Agony. He held it in defense and stood apart from the young man by the length of his cast shadow, not stepping into what seemed to be his range. "I'd like to ask you how you did that."

"Sup man" the young man said. He stopped the ball in his hand and tucked it up under his arm. "You know I just did it like I always did. They couldn't make me forget what I'm best at so they just put me away in the wall."

"How though?" Mort asked, seeing the ball. "With that?"

"Yeah man" the young man said. "Like I told them when I got here, 'I _am_ basketball'. Name's Jeremy. Jeremy Johnson. My friends call me JJ for short. What's up with you, man?" Mort saw nothing in the young man's face to fight, nor did he have the want to force it out of him. There was no hostility or anger, just the youthful innocence of being in a place where life is the greatest anomaly. Mort sheathed his shovel and crossed his arms.

"They call me 'the Mortician' for some odd and godless reason" Mort said. "Most people call me Mort."

"You some kind of thug or something?" JJ asked.

"Some kind" Mort agreed. "In fact, I'm here so that I can hope to be of the worst kind."

"Ice cool, bro" JJ said. He extended his long, thin yet sinuous and powerful arm with a fist balled up. Mort tapped the fist first down, then up, then knuckle-to-knuckle. "Ice cool."

"Indeed it is" Mort said with a grin. He faced down a demon with no devil in him, one banished for having the face of an angel in a land where all the angels were dead...

* * *

Four-Eyes, the grizzly demon man whose life Yvonne helped restore, walked the two stunned and subconsciously attacked humans to the end of the living maze. It was a solid wall but one without paint or blood or any sign of contact in too long. The whole hall began to bellow with an upset growling. Now there was only that wall and the straight stretch to it. Four-Eyes stopped and looked back. Tom continued forward for three or so steps until he was close behind Yvonne again. They were both still half-conscious and deep within their own illusions of terror. Four-Eye's took Yvonne's hands from his pants and turned around to them.

"Do not move" he said. "Anything you see will remain an illusion until I break down the final wall."

"Understood" Tom said slowly. "We will not move." Yvonne lowered her head with a wide, coy grin and bit a nail while her chest jerked in silent laughter. Tom put a hand on her shoulder to keep her in place, though in his eyes he was paling a mad monster made of wiggling stalks attached to floating eyes with a mouth for a body and twenty slithering green tongues. It spoke to him in random syllables making no words and klaxon whines. He ignored it and he knew what he felt. His fingers stretched and met together around Yvonne's round, curved shoulder. Four-Eyes sighed and walked forward. He was immune to the illusions as his subconscious was sealed away and merged with his actual mind, giving him a perfect understanding of himself and of his evil intentions, making him the perfect fighting monster. Therefor, when the walls moved together to crush him, he knew it was real.

He caught the walls with his thick arms extended and elbows just slightly bent so his arms wouldn't break and buckle together in front of his chest. His back was flexed with muscularity far, far beyond the frame of even an above-average human's back. His skin was taught against the bulges and rolling folds of his thick muscles. He groaned loudly as he held back the pressing walls and slid himself forward. The skin on his palms was ripped off as he proceeded and he left a deep and moist trail of blood streaking the walls as he walked forward in sudden, heavy stomps. He stopped just before the end of the crushing wall with the feeble exit just ahead of him. His groaning turned to shouting and all four of his eyes winced in pain.

"GAAAAHH!!!" he shouted.

"Four-Eyes!" Tom called.

"Don't die!" Yvonne called with a laugh in her voice. "We need you! HAHAHAHA!!!"

"Don't laugh, Yvonne" Tom said.

"I can't help it!" Yvonne gleed. The walls silently slammed shut and the roaring stopped. Yvonne and Tom were stunned and shocked. They waited for some sign of life or some random barreling of fists through the wall to help guide them out of the mind-rape hallways, but in the darkness that surrounded them nothing seemed to come. It was just silence and an absence of suffiient lighting. Despite that, however, the feint sign still came in the darkness. **A trail of blood began to ooze from the press of the walls** and Yvonne's mad happiness was drained. The dimension ceased its attack as their human hopes fell down sharply and gave way to an unspeakable fear.

"Oh shit...." Tom said. He sank down to the floor with Yvonne, his fingers returned to their natural human position and both hands on her shoulders. Yvonne's eyes began to swell with tears which she curiously watched drop to the floor below her.

"What?" Yvonne whispered. "Are these tears? Am I crying? Am I sad? Tom, what's going on? Something's wrong with my eyes. They're leaking. Are they cut? Am I bleeding?"

"Calm down, Yvonne" Tom said. "You'll be fine, but just stay calm. I think...we're fucked...."

".....I don't cry when I get fucked" Yvonne said, her voice now wavering beyond her control and want. She started to shake from the chest with heaves of sobbing and her hands up to block her eyes instinctively. "I....don't cry...!" Tom stroked her shoulders gently to try and comfort her in a realm where their comfort had been eliminated by the unconscious stroke of their brains. She cried into her hands at the loss of her aid, her only useful power in the world anymore, while Tom realized it and gave her what comfort he could as just another body in the void of her existence.

Suddenly, light. The vision before them broke down and a bright light was shining, broken down somehow beyond the cruched-together walls where the demon was trying to get to before he was destroyed. The light became wider and wider until it was a near perfect square of white with a tall, perfectly-built man standing as a broad shadow in the light, throwing his arms forward and calling silently.

"Yvonne!" Tom whispered. He stood her up and began walking her forward. "Yvonne, look! He's alive! He did it! It was nothing but an illusion!"

"**FUCK OFF!!!**" Yvonne shouted. She slumped her shoulders forward and walked in a painful stagger through the unsolid walls. Tom looked to either side of him as the illusions inside his brain vanished. They were instead replaced by a mirror that cast an unlimited number of recursive reflections, each one darker than the next with brighter eyes and a more sinister air altogether. The reflections began glaring at him. He was still out of his proper mind and couldn't tell if he was really glaring or not. Then the jaws distended and the mouths all opened up to the point where the jaws split from the head and the head fell off. **Then Jormungandr was glaring Tom down** with his identical face and snake-like hair all slicked back along his scalp. He mouthed something to Tom, though the reflections made no noise. Tom read the lips as best he could.

'We're all going down together'. Something like that. Then, in a blinding glare of light, Tom and Yvonne were walked by Four-Eyes himself out into what seemed to be open air without rain. Yvonne opened her eyes and parted her hands from her face to look around. Behind her was a broken and dilapidated wall that slowly repaired itself with shaking, weak arms. Before her was the grand demon her savior who stood with stoic pride, his muscles tightened and flexed with his fists upon his hips. Yvonne first wordlessly gasped in astonishment and happiness. Then she ran into the demon and threw her arms around his waist to weep into his taught, rock-hard abs.

"You dick!" she shouted. "Don't scare me like that! I thought you died! Those fucking walls made me think you died! Ggguaaahhh!!!"

"Relax, blond angel" Four-Eyes said. He stroked Yvonne's hair from her face and she looked up at him. He was looking up and away to the bright lights that were shining off in some distance. His eyes were glowing red and his mouth was grinning, full of fangs, in his blood-lusting way. "We've entered into truly hostile territory now!"

"Should she really relax in that case?" Tom asked.

"This is simply a stretch of Limbo" Four-Eyes explained, "where all souls initially go or return to, It's an aimless place that is infinite and pointless. Souls either band together in tribes or kill rampantly for their own private purposes. It's basically a realm without rule or regard to survival in any respect. Those who live kill, and those who die are those that utterly fail to live by killing. It is the ultimate, baser form of human society! It is the ultimate competition!!!" Tom walked ahead of Four-Eyes and spied into the long stretch of strange field around them.

"Looks like a Football stadium" Tom mentioned. And indeed, it was. They had exited a reality of mental stress and entered one of purely physical exasperation. Tom, a perpetual high-school gamer nerd, and Yvonne, the Queen of Cunts, were in a football stadium in a realm populated with visceral, mindless demons.

"Well fuck!" Four-Eyes shouted. "When's the game start?" He pounded his fists together with a wicked crack of his knuckles against themselves. "**I've two perfect playbooks right here!!!**"

"High-school football, eh?" Yvonne said, restoring herself to a charismatic wonderment of an attitude. She unsheathed her bat and set it to the ground like a cane, leaning forward so much that her chest was nearly naught but F-cup cleavage. "That sounds...mighty exciting!"

"Fucking jocks" Tom lowed. He drew his sword and a scathing glare. "They never did anything directly to me, but dammit, they did things to my friends!"

"You had friends?" Four-Eyes said mockingly.

_Fucking jocks!_ Tom lowed in his head.

* * *

Samuel Corazo. Age 39, looks no less than 25. When enrolled in the service of an overseas war in an unmentioned foreign tropical country, he underwent an inhuman transformation that gave him transcendental powers of sight. He possesses eyes that God himself would envy and that the devil, should he ever know, would covet with a steel-clawed clutching grip. He knew this and kept it a secret. He knew what powers moved for his throat and hid his abilities from the sight of mortals like him. Now he was discovered for his uniqueness by the strangest existing creature he had ever seen. A demon child in a tiny suit and shorts, colored gray and devoid of life but still breathing and moving as if it lived like a true being. The shadows of the hall ran across the walls from the shade of a rotating fanblade in front of a source of light. That was the illusion, anyway.

"Why are you?" Sam asked, avoiding cliché. The boy-demon scoffed and rolled his big, wide-irises into the corners of his steely eyes.

"That's not an improvement, you know" the boy said. "It's just the first, most obvious dodge any man would make when prompted not to ask a stranger _who_ he is. If you're so curious about me, ask me something relative to our relationship."

"The only thing I care about" Sam said "is what your tombstone would say." Sam drew out his gun, his _gun _gun, the big fucking one, and cocked back the hammer with a high-pitched metal tick. "Provided, of course, this dimension has some sort of graveyard system in place, which I doubt. Therefore, I don't give a shit about you at all unless you've painted the walls!" Sam fired. Even the boy wasn't fast enough to shift reality around the sanctified space-rupturing blast of the bullet. The explosion of light and smoke from the muzzle fire of the gun wrapped itself around the edges of the blessed platinum frame like glowing, angelic wings and a distant halo formed as lightning flashed through the hole in Purgatory Sam made.

"**My but you're an impatient one**" the boy said. Sam could tell where he was in an instant from his voice. He whipped his head around and his face met tiny, grade-school foot. He was stumbled back by the power of the little-kid kick he got to the face. The boy landed back on the ground and jumped head-first into Sam's gut. Sam was bent over himself in pain when the boy fell away and leaped back into the darkness. He kept his gun tight in his grip and braced his body and spiritual fortitude to fire it again when the demon-vision revealed itself again.

_It's useless to resist me_. The thoughts began to invade Sam's head, spoken in his own distrustful voice. _I am the creeping shadow in the sky. I see and understand all..._ Sam stood up, bracing himself to push through the pain. _It isn't real_ he told himself. _This pain, this child, every we watch night and day for you to screw up, and lo, here you stand, too confused to even think! I'm alright. I'm fine. Everything will perish the same way, in a blood-red fire and flood. There's oil floating in everyone's soul. All I need is to spark the calamity. Bitch is getting obnoxious. We can see through even your eyes, foolish little I'm a man. I don't need to listen to this. Can you hear me? I've killed children younger than you and felt proud of it. So kill them then. See if I care. I haven't seen an unbaptized baby since I got here. Is this really Purgatory? Isn't this Hell? There's no repentance here. There is none in life. What happens happens. You can say all you want but it won't change the past and you can't control the present. It's all lies._

_Destiny is just another word for bullshit._

Sam spun around in place and fired out the window. There was a rushing blast of wind and an ear-piercing shriek of pain over the deafening roar of his bun's powerful shot. When it all died down and the light vanished from the air Sam stood braced against a humid gust of rain and wind from the eternally somber outside realm. He stood at the edge of the hole he made through the window and gazed out, washing his hair in the rain. The ground was gone. **How far up he was, he couldn't say.** So he looked up, and saw the edge of a roof a half-story above him.

"The top of the mountain" Sam said. He let his hair all fall down and the whipped it back up with a cool stroke of his hand. His glasses didn't get wet. They never did. "So up from here is the earthly paradise, right? Will I find some poorly-scribed 'Dante was here' Latin scripture in the bark of a tree when I get there?"

"You won't" the child said. He appeared from far down the hall, half in the darkness which he illuminated with his own steel-colored eyes and spinning, golden irises. "This is no nightmarish trip you're taking. It's all real, linked between worlds by means of your human domain, where the lost come to travel and where the pitiful come to suffer."

"So this is Hell?" Sam asked.

"Hell is for the weak-hearted" the child said. "**Those Hell can't contain are here forever!**" Sam sighed and aimed down the hall. The child vanished and reappeared. Suddenly, all Sam could see was those two perfectly huge, cat-like eyes glaring at him. He stepped forward and countered the child's flying head-butt with his own, damaging both of them. Sam's forehead was cut from the sheer force but the child tumbled back from the force and lay in the middle of the hall, seemingly broken by Sam's counter. Sam just let himself bleed a little and felt the warm blood trailing down the bridge of his nose in total apathy. He walked over and armed himself with his gun. His big, pretty fucking gun.

As he approached the child's body, slow and cautiously, the darkness around it seemed to part slowly. He crouched down and saw nothing in its skull. The eyes that were so fearsome and characteristic were gone. Sam took the kid's head in the palm of his hand and looked it over. The forehead had caved in and was bleeding black blood profusely, as if all the blood in the child's body was stored in its large and round head. His mouth hung open with a swollen, dead tongue filling it between the flat and ordered rows of teeth.

_You didn't hit me_ the child said. Sam gasped in horror. The child's head twitched around in his vision, shaking violently with dark flashes of light, and then faced him hollow like a pumpkin with a hideous expression of black carved into it. _**Not even close**_. Sam turned to the left. Standing right next to him, looking down at him, was a man in a suit. Sam barely got to detail even that of him before he was thrown by some invisible force down the hall and out the hole into unending limbo that he opened with his sacred hand-cannon.

"SHIT!!!" Sam cursed. That same man, whom he presumed had thrown him, stood in that rounded gap with his hands folded, nothing but a shadow with **bright-red pupils glaring out from steel-colored eyes.** Sam aimed his gun for one final shot.....but his clip was empty. In his spiteful haste he had forgotten to check his ammo, and now he was without even that final vindication of a hopeful shot as he flew through the air. All he could do was scream for his lost humanity, his lost life in the endless field of limbo outside infinite and dark Purgatory.

A flash of lightning darkened the shadow. Sam finally saw exactly what gauntlet he had been thrown into and words escaped him. The mass was indescribable. Sam vanished into darkness with only that thought.....

* * *

Johnny walked the halls some more, spinning his daggers in his hand and whistling some random tune to himself. He walked as he waited to encounter some devious thing that hid around a blind corner or in the unknown darkness of his own mind to come out roaring with blades for fingers and a flamethrower for genitalia, and he itched to kill it. He would begin to juggle his two knives without challenge and add a third on impulse, having to stop and waver himself to keep up with it. Two was his limit for now. He still walked along with an uncaring demeanor and a happy grin that bordered on the psychotic sadist glee of his own thoughts of massacre and mayhem.

"Fundip is not a fun word" Nny said in his own depth of opinionated preaching. "I shall kill anyone I hear use it from hereon out." Nny turned a corner and saw, down a length of twisted-tile hall a scene of brutish carnage. A beast with thick, curved blades for fingers and a long, thin segmented bone tail was crouched over a gory mess of blood and shredded bodies eating loudly. It's body was humanoid without much humanity. It had raptor legs, thick and deadly looking, with sharp scalpel-like blades for feet. Its arms were human up to its claws and were bound by its shoulders by thick steel bars netted and laced together in some indescribable way. Its head, its skull, extended back in two straight horns that pointed away in a V shape while its face had no feature but skin tightly stretched from one side to the other and pinned by metal staples and its huge, wide, nail-fanged mouth that filled with dripping, raw bits of demon meat.

"Well shit" Nny scoffed. "I guess dinosaurs were some villainous sinners way waaaay back when, eh?" The creature heard Nny through its tiny ear-holes at the beginning of each thick horn of bone on its head. It's head jerked up and its clawed hands threw down the remains it chewed on. A dark red forked tongue flicked and slithered out of its mouth, past its razor-sharp nails of teeth. It stood at its full height and revealed its body to Nny where nearly all of its skin had been stretched to tearing and secured to some other part by a metal band driven through its firm musculature. Blood and flesh and wrought, steel-heated iron was all that made this phantasmagorical creature. It stepped forward with a clack of metal to the swirling tiled floor. Nny took a slide of his foot backwards and armed his daggers like swords in his hands.

"Looks pretty dismal, eh?" Nny said. "A grim situation, right?" he asked once more. "It's like being chained to an engine block with a fucking Velociraptor, isn't it?" Nny kept his pause long this time and stayed ready. Then, in utter curiosity, he turned around and saw that his conscience was gone. "Huh? Where could she have gone?" he wondered. The beast charged at that distracted moment, its arms out at its sides and its blade-feet piercing the floor with each empowered, deep step it made. It opened its mouth with tongue trailing out the side and roared.

"**HAAAAAAA**hjkjjjfsa-09)(jfasdngk" At some point whatever it was roaring became so loud and psychotic that Nny's mind failed to hear it and instead the maniac ignored it, turned to it with tiny glowing eyes set against a homicidal shadow over his brow, and he stepped in with a swing of his blades. The creature ran past Nny and fell down to clutch at its opened stomach. Nny had cut apart every staple holding its tightly stretched flesh together and out spilled its innards onto the floor. All manner of organs, thick and thing, squeedly and spoochy, slopped beneath the demon and bled into a wide and smelly puddle of blood. The demon coughed up something else that wiggled around briefly before hissing and dying on the floor.

"Qwertyy78dsnaigjagdaggagjhg" the demon said, again, imperceptible to Nny. Nny simply turned around and stomped on one of the metal rods he cut out, bending it and breaking it beneath his steel hoof.

"Same to you, blood-fucker" Nny said with a derisive wag of his dagger. "You shouldn't attack someone without first knowing who they are, right? Or is that only how humans work. I don't know. **I've been a monster so long, I don't know the etiquette anymore!**" Nny started running forward. The demon looked over its shoulders and heard his advance, then pushed itself up onto the bladed points of its feet to try and run away. Its fingers and palms scraped across the wall as it painfully staggered into the darkness where Nny's eyes couldn't reach. Nny stopped in front of the pile of organs and watched them continue pulsing and shooting out blood to an uneven rhythm. He saw, from his vast experience of opening people up, at least two hearts, forty feet of small intestines, part of a colon and a half-eaten liver. Nny stepped away from them as they emitted a dreadful and powerful smell.

"What kind of strange thing have I wondered upon now?" Nny wondered. His thoughts ended when a noise came to his ears. Tiny pricks of metal scraping the tile floor and the stabbing of blades. Nny knew some other monstrousity was coming his way and he backed away fast. He watched the hallway where it came from, carefully viewing the shadows from the light around the corner. Then it came, but not on the floor. With three legs of metal blade it came crawling on the ceiling,** a hideous hanging pile of loose flesh and yawning mouths all writhing and moaning for no better end. **Its flesh hung around no structure. It was nothing but hollow skin and boneless jaws, holes with teeth grown around the edges, with three thick and powerful branch-like legs ccarrying it forward.

"Well now" Nny said. "That's certainly something new....." Nny had no real words for what he saw. A tentacle striped broad black and purple distended from one of the mouth holes and uncurled itself at Johnny, showing at its end a bulbous growth of starch white and a wide maw of flat teeth.

"**Fuck!"** it growled. **"Fucking juicy berries filled with toxic melanoma!!!"** Johnny became suddenly appalled and disgusted by the creature's extra growth. It grew one long hair from the top of its head and two squinting black eyes started to form over its sickening mouth wherein a broad, pink tongue had generated grossly. **"We're all in this like mice, down for the count when the button gets pressed. My soap long ago ran out, but by Hilda, my stink is gone! Johnny C., ****bring me life, I will restore you elegance and toasty, Toasty CHEEESE!!!!"**

_Happy Noodle Boy_ Johnny thought, his mind blanked with shock. _So this....is where I sent you....!_


	79. Take the Field, Daring Bastards

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Football: the bane and fear of all loathing in any high-school nerd. The constant arrogant dick-headedness of the jocks on the team who credit themselves as mythical figures among mere mortals with every game they win, running headfirst into a future with no substance or worth with a less than one-in-a-million chance that they will ever be good enough to make any kind of professional league. The best they can hope for is a sports scholarship that they can waste doing nothing but partying and drugs in college before either being sent to prison to continue playing football and taking it up the ass or leading a life of minimum wage, white-trash stupidity at the mercy of the truly gifted intellects who lead the world into hell as the cost of their own personal heavens.

All humanity is scum to a respectable degree but jocks hold a special place in this constant Purgatory. They are the guards and the elite monsters who patrol halls to punish and pummel and rape the disobedient souls in a wrathful realm without mercy or order. They are perpetually cast to live their lives under someone else's thumb, being subject to the will of the halls whether they want to or not to the degree where they lose their own ability to know if they act on their own or not. Their unconscious minds are overflown with commands, chaotic mass forced to order, and they are lost. Big bodies that move for no reason, that is their punishment and their purpose. And this their private realm, where they gather as shadows under stadium seats, waiting to be called or to be challenged by the bold and the fierce of Purgatory.

On one side was the home team endzone. It was white with ghostly-blue lettering that read nothing at all. 'AKTNNGHP' was their team name, their mascot two wings flying attached to an arm holding underhand a bloody eyeball. A totally arcane symbol meaning little, even to the demon who inspected it. He ground the colored grass beneath his powerful, stone-skinned talons and heard the squealing torment of the grass underfoot. Everything lived in Purgatory, and each blade was a part of a soul left behind from the splatter of blood and spit on the long field. He grinned down and stared across the field where his two companions stood observing the visiting endzone. That one was bare, even of substance, and led into a black void that spiraled down in a vertigo spin.

"That's bizarre" Tom said.

"How do they score like this?" Yvonne wondered.

"Well" Tom said "technically it depends. This place is screwed the fuck up as it is, so if we would play a game, I bet they'd make our goal over there just to make it nearly impossible to win."

"How do you know about football?" Yvonne asked. "You don't strike me as any kind of enthusiast for it."

"Yeah but I'm smart" Tom said "and even with the two, maybe three, games I've ever watched in my life I was able to understand enough of the rules to know how it's played. Beyond that, this end has no goalpost, so we couldn't know if we could even score with field-goals at all."

"I suppose Four-Eyes would know" Yvonne said "if this place can really do that or not. He's a demon here, after all." Tom and Yvonne slowly started walking down the yard lines toward their heroic demon leader as he monitored all the field and the valley of stands that surrounded them. Uncountable seats stretching up into darkness limited only by the arcane material cloth that made a sky to block the rain; a thick and almost plastic material that didn't imitate cloth at all.

"I'm a bit wary about trusting a demon" Tom said.

"He just doesn't like you very much" Yvonne said.

"Yeah, that's why" Tom said. "How'd you convince him to do this, by the way? You said you made him somehow?"

"Yes" Yvonne said. "In a way, I gave him the life he fights with now. I made him promise that, if I helped him, he would help me for as long as he was able..." Yvonne turned her head down with a distant gaze and grabbed at the loose and tear-soaked fabric of her ruined shirt. "It was my power that brought him to life. In that way, he is sort of....my child...."

"Your power?" Tom asked. "I didn't know you had any kind of, well not to say you're not powerful at all. I mean, is it really magical?" Yvonne looked up and smiled at Tom, the first sincere smile he'd seen from the girl in the longest time, perhaps even the first. They reached Four-Eyes who stood with his arms crossed like a diligent guarding deity over a bridge or path.

"There are dark forces everywhere" he said. His voice had risen in volume and depth to a booming, powerful quality which echoed and resonated all through the air and across all the chairs in its reach. "Monsters sneak about, ready to prey on innocent lives. Their clutch is adamant. Their power is both known and unknown. All that flows through this realm does so at the will of the mighty, godlike churning hands of the greater beings that hide herein. This realm is house and home to an infinite stretch of unimaginable terrors. **Shall we summon them!?**"

"No" Tom said immediately. Four-Eyes took in a deep breath, relaxing his taught and steel-hard muscles to expand his chest and lift his diaphragm as high as he could within his body. His inhuman lungs expanded and pushed against the muscle walls and bony ribs of his body and the air compressed through his throat and past his vocal cords so fast that blood followed in a gush out of his mouth when he began his damning roar.

"**FORCES!!! COME OUT AT ONCE!!! THIS DEMON SEEKS WAAAAAAAR!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!"** The wind of his voice blew Tom over and knocked Yvonne down onto his lap. She sat up and angrily curled her fists together.

"What are you doing!?" she shrieked. Four-Eyes gargled his blood and help his mouth shut as he shook it around like mouthwash in his cheeks. Then he turned around and snorted up a foul amount of demonic mucous to add to his already vile blood and spat a huge red, viscous glob onto the home-team's endzone mascot's wing.

"Now we wait" Four-Eyes growled. Yvonne stood up from Tom's lap, which was uncharacteristically rigid, with a huff and a stomp.

"Why did you do that?" she demanded. "What has come over you? How will this help me at all?" Four-Eyes slowly turned to her with all four eyes glowing bright red, like blood, and redness still wet on his chin.

"This has nothing to do with you" he said. "I remember these dog bastards well. They were the ones who took me to that wretched place where you found me. After my mind was fucked they tore off my muscles and ate them to grow strong, then dragged me through the halls into the Realm of Carnage! If for anything, let this be for me, breather of my life. **I want to kill these cocksuckers and skull fuck them before I escape this godless place! At least grant me that!!!**" His anger was too hard for Yvonne to dissuade. Tom got up as if out of a daze and stood erect, unaware of his erection until he looked down. Yvonne turned and saw him facing the other way to save himself face from looking her dead on.

"Tom" Yvonne began, "will you help us?"

"Of course" Tom said. The shadows were crawling from the stands to the field and the lush green of the turf was quickly overtaken with a sickening darkness that flooded from all directions. Only where the three stood was at all safe from the constant rushing of darkness that gathered near the wide, maddening void at the opposite side of the field. The shadows converged and thickened. They became mass rather than absence of light and twisted themselves into forms with long, thick arms and clutching fingers that reeled themselves up and out. Huge round shoulders and giant, armored bodies. These fiends were the embodiment of strength in its most brutal form in eternal Purgatory, the Home Team. They all formed, identical in their grotesquely huge bodies and faced hidden behind the darkness of their true self under the helmet. All that they were composed of enormous bodies of muscle and power, grinding teeth and round white lights for eyes.

They roared and stomped the ground, they roared and threw their heads up to the ceiling, they roared villainous and hostile animal voices to their enemy team, a demon and two mortals, at their end of the field. A single shadow converged and spun itself into form before Four-Eyes, the sacred object of the realm, a football made perfectly and unbreakable in its firmness and density. Four-Eyes held it out, lacing facing the enemy team of eleven men who, in a line, took up the whole width of the field, and clutched the object with a hard press of his fingers. The lace opened into an blue eye and blinked.

"**GAME ON!!!!!"** he roared. He walked forward, the eye shut, and punted the ball hard. It went soaring across the field and was caught by the center-most man in the line. Suddenly everything was full of life! The stadium lights were lit and cast the living blue mist of anonymous souls into full form, a full stadium of home-team fans, and cheerleaders spawned out of the walls spontaneously with powerful kicking legs and lethally sharp mouths of knives.

"Cheerleaders" Yvonne lowed. "Bunch of prissy, ruined, over-important bitches!"

"Bunch of goddamn cunts" Tom said. He drew out his sword and took up his mask. "I'm assuming this isn't traditional football?"

"Of course not" Four-Eyes said, already in motion to start running with both arms tensed back at his side. **"That's be ridiculous!!!"** He and Tom both rushed forward while Yvonne took to the sideline devoid of life to cheer them on, facing off against her own foes that danced and hopped while flashing their tight under-skirt fashion and demonic flicks of their tongues to her. She glowered at them, ignoring the game, while lethal forces prepared to meet on the field of battle...

* * *

Mort's equipment rested on the floor off the court. His heavy boots rested with them as it was easier for him to move around barefoot in the current conditions. JJ watched him prepare himself by hopping around while moving his arms in an eclectic, mysterious path through the air, following the feel of the flow of the winds of fate around him without seeing them through his goggles. He stopped with his feet flat and stood plainly across from JJ who kept the ball in his hand ever spinning. The demonic incarnation of goodwill and skill that he was had shrunken down to a more reasonably high human height rather than the fourteen-foot impossibility that Mort had med. Now they were ready to play, a half-court game with only one basket that had been lowered with a crash when JJ awoke.

"You sure you're not too old for this?" JJ asked.

"One is never to old for anything" Mort said. "It is the will of skill that leads to greatness."

"have you ever played ball before?" JJ asked. Mort stayed silent for a moment before an answer escaped him.

"Once" he said "in prison, but the men there were more concerned about getting shanked in the yard or raped to put on a good game."

"Were you any good back then?" JJ asked.

"....I can't recall" Mort admitted. "Admittedly, I was more focused on overthrowing the established order and making a precedence for myself as a threat to order, so I wasn't really playing seriously either. Nobody ever did anything well in prison."

"Well that's not surprising" JJ said. "You at least know how to play?"

"Of course" Mort said. JJ checked him the ball and the game commenced. One on one, best to four. Mort dribbled the ball at his left and faced an immediate block by long and lithe armed JJ. Mort inched forward with turns of his foot and suddenly spun away, now dribbling with his right, around JJ. JJ ran after him as he headed for the basket and tried to steal the ball away but Mort made a jumping shoot before JJ could close in. It was too far and without guide, so it bounced from the rim and back into play. It hit the floor once before JJ scooped it up and made a short rush before Mort blocked him. Even though he played a shorter game than normal, JJ was still a tall young man. Where Mort stood just over six feet JJ stood nearer seven and had the longer legs and arms to use. He made a jump shot from approximately the same range as Mort and sunk it, nothing but net. JJ nodded with a grin while Mort snapped his fingers and went for the ball.

"You sure you're not cheating?" Mort asked. "You'd hate to see how I handle cheating in any respect."

"You can pick it up, can't you?" JJ said. "I explained to you, that ball is pure motion, man. It's nothing but kinetic energy in the form of a basket ball, and it's so dense that only I can handle it right." Mort picked it up, spun it between his hands and caught it again, feeling no additional force pushing against him from any way that was abnormal. He ruled that the ball was as real as it could be and passed it to JJ to check to him again. "One-nothing, ice."

"I won't stay as nothing for long" Mort said. "Height is only so much of the game."

"Yeah, true" JJ said. He checked the ball and Mort immediately ran forward. JJ noticed the lean he had as he dribbled, watching the ball go down and then bounce up and at an angle to the left. Mort was attempting to run and dodge to the left, so JJ intercepted him by stepping right. Mort's trap worked flawlessly and he switched his feet, left stepping over right, and spun around with the ball thrown into a bounce that was caught by his right hand. He had evaded JJ completely and drove the ball home for a single-point shot from just before the rim. It bound once and sunk in. Mort stood under to catch it and dribbled it to his position while JJ backed away to receive the check.

"The mind is a powerful weapon" Mort said. "More powerful than any muscle in the body and more destructive than any weapon a man can possess." Mort checked the ball and went on lecturing while JJ played. Mort slid quickly to block JJ's advances, seeing him play an exact mirror to Mort's previous strategy. "You can see how, can't you? With only a single step I have marred the path your mind has taken and elevated the game beyond the limit your body alone can perform at."

"Maybe" JJ admitted. "But you don't know my body's limit!" JJ bounced the ball between Mort's spread legs and wove around him. Just as Mort realized what gambit he had played JJ had already circled him and caught the ball in a dribble. Mort pursued immediately, knowing his defense was effectively shot if he strayed too far. JJ's legs carried him farther with each step but Mort was powerful and sped up beside him. JJ stopped and tried to shoot but his arms were restricted by Mort's closeness in his block. Just as he broke his body free Mort hopped back and jumped up, knocking the ball away with but the tip of his finger so that it's course was flayed. It bounced on the rim twice before falling off and into Mort's grip. JJ advanced immediately to block. Mort took a quick leap back and jumped up with a jump shot. As JJ jumped through the air he caught the ball, turned and shot it weakly to sink it in before nearly landing on Mort in his awkward topple of a fall.

"Ow!" JJ exclaimed. The ball fell through and bounced itself to a roll while Mort waited for JJ to stand himself up.

"You're obviously unafraid of letting your body be subject to your mind" Mort said. "Is it really okay for you to be broken so carelessly?" JJ stood up and pressed against his head until his neck cracked.

"I'm fine" he said. "I'm tough, you know. You've gotta be tough if you wanna wind at something."

"True" Mort said, "but tough how?"

"Well, in sports" JJ began as he went for the ball "you've gotta be tough physically. If your body's good then you can be quick mentally, or even slow and still be good, like in football where all you've gotta do is keep guys from getting past you. Sometimes its better to be tough mentally though, so you can't be read, like you are. That kind of planning and experience is good to have, and with it you can have a weaker body and still pull stuff off that trumps what guys like me can do." Mort moved back to position and JJ checked the ball to him. "You know, good team leaders have all kinds of qualities."

"If men are islands" Mort theorized as he dribbled "then a good leader is one in which the landscape changes as the seasons do, not one made of trees or of sand or of ice alone. But men are not islands, nor are they clouds or rocks or lone wolfs or any of that hardened drivel." Mort went for a straight run, simply going along the sidelines until he could make a shot, then tried to dodge out from under JJ's long reach. Mort grabbed the ball to keep it from being stolen and took two long steps before making a diving sort of leap towards the basket and tossing the ball upward. He fell full forward and let fate guide the ball onto the rim, off the broken board and then through the hoop. He stood himself up with a tie in the score and saw JJ already going off to get the ball.

"Then what are men, sensei?" JJ asked sarcastically, passing the ball to Mort to check. Mort smirked and tried to spin the sphere on his finger tip.

"Men simply are" Mort said. "It can be rationalized no other way. We exist, basically, and whatever else we think is something grown out of such existence to try and justify it deeper." Mort moved to position and waited for JJ to ready himself.

"Then what are women?" JJ asked, sarcastically and rhetorically as far as Mort could tell. He grinned and answered with a joke.

"Annoying as hell" he said. As the ball was checked, upon its first bounce to the ground and before it traveled fully up into JJ's hands, the doors to the outer halls were blasted open with the accompanying scream of indescribable pain and horror. The held-back sounds of a thousand girls dying echoed deafeningly as they were released all at once into the loud and spacious gymnasium, followed by the traumatic whines of those same thousand girls being raped. Mort withstood the wind of the sound and equipped his goggles from around his neck. **He saw terror **and immediately brought them back down.

"What the heck!?" JJ exclaimed. "Yo! We're playing here! Bust someone else's court!" Mort placed a calming hand to his shoulder and moved in front of him. In the doorways stood demons of the most definitive name. Beings wearing cloaks made of flesh sewn together with bone and metal and decorated with zippers of teeth and buttons of eyes and zipper-pulls made of tongues. Ghastly creatures colored a sickened hue of white and charred-meat brown that stood on two legs and carried with them no arms. Their nails were blades and their skin was taught against itself where blades and razors shone through as natural growths beneath their skin. They wore broad hats with human nails hung by fibrous strings around the whole brim. Their faces were partly hidden by shadows but the exposed rows of teeth curled up along their odd-shaped jaws grinned out as steely-gray, dripping with hungry moisture.

One opened its mouth and hissed, letting a thick wet tongue flick out and lick the air in front of it, extending the muscular mass until it reached the length of its arm, and it pointed to Mort. The other was began running full forward with its bladed arms held out and its cloak of suffering human skin billowing behind it.

"Yo!" JJ shouted. He tossed his ball, charged with force, and blasted the demon full back and into the wall with a bloody splat. The ball returned to his hands perfectly and he began to dribble it.

"Let me just get my things" Mort said, waving a finger to the active monster aiming him down. "I'll be with you shortly..."

* * *

Sam walked through the rainy plain without a single part of him hurt or injured. He miraculously escaped death and even pain by landing on the body of a soulless wanderer whose fat content was inhumanly high. He was basically just a walking pillow made of cholesterol and low-motivation which had saved Sam's life at the expense of being broken. Now Sam was soaked through all his expensive clothing and the outline of his empty gun harnesses was visibly even through his thick, damp suit. He carried the holy implement of judgment in his hand, loaded with his only remaining clip of sacred bullets that he had on hand.

No matter how many times he saw it a scowl of disbelief still crept to his face. Purgatory was indeed vast, if not endless, **an eternal stretch of structure that stopped being a building the further away he gazed and began as a chain of mountains of black on the horizon.** All the fields around him fell off into an unseen distance, covered by soft rolling hills, into a dark and eternally raining sky with no light but lightning flashes. Sam had only now realized everything, all the futility he fought with, all the force he had already wasted, and everything else that tormented him. He had just begun to realize that his weapons were useless against Purgatory's true force and all he fought with was better to leave rust in the rain.

"Fuck this" Sam said. He stopped in his approach to the wall just in sight where countless bodies of soulless men and women leaned themselves against it and the wall they themselves became, and he sighed wearily. He took off his glasses and rubbed his godless eyes in exasperation. "I'm tired. I'm angry. This sucks. I'm done! Even if I die or have to live through my past forever, it's better than all of this. It's too much for me...." Sam looked up to the sky, looking down on himself in pity. He saw through his cosmic sight the truth of his age, a tired and aggravated man who lived beyond his limits all the time. A man who was better off dead and happy than alive and in perpetual turmoil. He sighed and put on his glasses again.

"Let me go home...**I'll repent there later...**" Sam looked up and saw a legion of zombies facing him. Silently, with steps lighter than the rain, they had surrounded him. Their rotting brains and expressionless faces crowded and thickened the air with a frightful stench. Sam was startled and jerked away initially, but found that they were equally swarmed behind him. He was enclosed by the bodies, all equally captivated and mad with an arcane hunger.

".....what?" he asked. They all just stared with empty eyes. "This?" Sam asked, rising up his gun. They showed no response. "These?" he asked, pointing to his eyes. Still nothing. Thinking nothing he removed his glasses and saw, from behind, how they lurched forward with eyes dark and mouths gaping open all around him. Sam began to fight his way on top of the growling heads and ran across their skulls to the end of the horde. They shambled after him as he ran to the wall and reached for a door. Lightning flashed and a shadow blocked his path. Sam saw only the glaring face of that boy for a split second and then the door was gone. Sam just huffed and aimed to the wall. "Fuck this shit!" and he shot a giant holy hole through Purgatory into its limbo. He ran in, replacing his glasses, still pursued by the raging zombies that came in from all over the infinite rainy plain to chase after the eyes of Sam.

Sam found himself in a lonely boiler-room area, a basement where maintenance demons would be certain to live. The walls were barren of art but many name tags hung clipped from wires and wire-mesh fencing that blocked passage to hot rooms of darkness. Sam ran without thought at all, his body moving on the instincts of a soldier, while the zombies behind chased after him silently. He turned a corner sharply and ran into an ash-colored girl floating in the air. He disregarded her and ran on, stomping on her face instinctively to keep her down. She began sobbing and holding her frail, broken nose while still folded on the floor in a fetal position. The zombies came around and stampeded her, stomping her into dust without a sound.

The silent death made a mess of everything they touched. Desire and want that overpowered the insane animal logic, a battle of supremacy over id-powered monsters. Sam didn't care for the intricacies of abandoned forms in the realm of abandon. He ran for stairs and found them. When he entered he locked the door and ran up four flights before he heard the door was broken followed by the silent march. Then he took to the nearest floor and locked that door as well. When he turned to run a fist met his face and sent him backwards, his shoes sliding with wet squeaks across the tiled floor until his back hit the jutting row of lockers and sense returned to him. He looked and the locked door was gone by the will of an opened hand.

The owner of that hand was a kingly figure among the demons whose very shadow ceased to exist past the ankles. He wore a black suit with thin, gray pinstripes that ran from collar to the bottom hem of his pants. On his feet were sleek and shine-polished leather shoes. His hands were chalk white and lacked nails but ended in sharp points of bone. He had the physique of a plain man, his suit covering whatever body was underneath and at least a flat chest giving his suit some depth. His head was familiar. Sam recognized it in the dead body of the child before. **It was the same, yet matured.** His eyes were now narrow, still steel where else white would be and darkened rotating red runes replacing his iris where a deep void of black penetrated as his pupils. His hair was smoothed and black, running along the round surface of his skull and short down his neck. His smile still stretched wide across his face, but it was narrow and the teeth visibly evil.

"You've done irreparable damage to my realm" said the man in his ethereal yet sinisterly lulling voice. "You're harder to kill than a mortal should be, though. What are you _really?_" Sam's mind finally caught up with his body and he was panting from his rapid dash away from the horde below. He heard a soft banging at the wall that quickly disappeared after only a few light knocks, and straightened himself out with a shoulder rolled forward at the demonic man in ideal dress facing him.

"Whatever I am" Sam said "I am the last thing you will ever see!" Sam rose his gun up and fired, chipping the paint from the walls of the long hallway and blasting a fierce rush of wind that curled up all the tiles from the floor. The panels of the ceiling moved and fell from the structure that held them up and lights were shattered at the sheer force of the bullet.

The man's body was unharmed and his narrow, steely glare unchanged. Sam just scoffed and cocked the hammer back once more. The man threw open a hand at Sam and blasted him away with powerful arcane force. Sam could feel it like a steel-handed punch to his ribs. They moved and constricted the air from his lungs, but nothing broke. He pushed himself up and looked down the hall where the man still stood, his hands now folded behind his back, and his steel-glare smile shining out beyond the utter darkness.....

_Well fuck_ Sam thought. _If it weren't easy, it isn't worth having? Is that how it goes? Fuck that. If it's impossible then it must be the stuff of myths, something mortals cannot comprehend or obtain without divine penalty. If it's not meant for me as a mortal, as a man, what is it worth to me?_ Sam stood full up and checked the condition of his gun, then glanced back at his enemy. The ground between them had been closed by half and his enemy was closer, his red glare still shining. _I suppose I should start consider what I'll be when I stop being a man...._


	80. The Original Evil beyond Hell's Gates

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

The demon was alone, standing center court, walking like a killer to his cornered victim, faced down by the fully-armed Mort and the empowered JJ. It cared for neither unequally. All it saw was death to deal hanging in the air past its dangling fingernail collection around the wide brim of its flesh hat. It snarled and charged at Mort first, seeing him armed with only a shovel, and attacked with ferocious and wild claw swings. Mort blocked them with Agony, the marvelous modern digging tool, and walked along with the demon's assault as if guiding him to some place where the winds met in his favor.

"Yo!" JJ called. "You need help just holler! I'll be right here!" Through the doorways of the gym another beastial creature appeared. This one a behemoth, long like a serpent with a body thick as a rhinoceros. Its head was like a compounded creature's skull combining the great jutting horn of a stag beetle, the antlers of an elk and above the empty eyeholes the thick horns of a bison. Its body was a constantly moving, sagging, thickened tube of flesh weighed down with some sloppy and dripping internal coating of bloody meats. It walked on thick and stubby legs, like an alligator, but each hand that hit the ground was human completely. An eye was on the back of each hand and they all blinked unevenly, disassociated with each other. This monster came in undetected by sound but caught by JJ in sight just before it could gore him. JJ dodged with a long leap to the side and the serpentine creature pushed its body up, standing with three pairs of hands in the air while the rest of its body came in from the door and started shuffling its way into a straight line.

Its jaws opened into a wide hole that led into a moistened digestive tunnel, thoroughly disgusting JJ on sight. He winced as the creature's arms all shivered with a mad intensity and, suddenly, those which were off the ground elongated into long and lithe, powerful looking arms with longer still fingers. The arms acting as legs remained stubby to support the weight of the shaking and turning flesh, moving as if alive separate of the monster's brain.

"Man" JJ said, "I hate centipedes!" JJ started dribbling his ball, each hit a gather of energy, each inch traveled and inch of force stored, and kept himself centered on the beast before him. Mort, meanwhile, continued to fight the creature of human build with a desperate guard. He ascended the fold-out bleachers like stairs and got to the highest ground, against the wall.

"Fuck off!" he shouted. He broke the monster's offense with a parry and jabbed his shovel into the creature's jaws. It gave out a quick shriek and tripped backward, falling down the stairs hat over heels. The hat didn't come off, and the shadows blocking its face never lifted. Mort ran down two seatings at a time and leaped from the middle of the bleachers with his shovel aimed to spike down as he flew. He jabbed into the beast's chest and stomped his feet onto the flat footrests of the spade. "HRAAGH!!!" he shouted. He impaled the beast to the floor, stepped off his shovel in a grand spin, unsheathed the Spade of Destiny and decapitated the shrieking thing through its neck, hearing the shifting and crunch of metal as his spade sliced so cleanly through its thin and rotted flesh. It stopped its hissing but didn't stop moving. Its arms and legs were shaking and tapping the floor in rhythm.

"What is this?" Mort wondered as he drew out Agony. The beast continued to jolt and shake wildly, its head leaking a mercury substance which stank of all things unholy, and made Mort retreat. He saw across the dim-lit gymnasium the great serpent monster which JJ was fighting. The beast opened its jaws yet again and let part through its fine, fang-lined trap a thick red worm-like tongue that shot through the air in an unpredictable curving motion at JJ. The spry young man dodged and passed his power ball into the creature's skull, reeling it back with the sheer impact of the force that returned the ball directly to him faster than it could be seen to travel.

"What are these things?" Mort wondered. "Not demons, not like I've seen. Not like JJ or the ghostly girls or that maniac asshole. This thing....it has no purpose, no direction. **I can feel from anywhere, this thing is not of this world at all...**" The beast drew its tongue back into its wide tunnel of a mouth and closed its skull, now resorting to using its long and powerful arms to grab and throw things. It moved its enormous body over to grab what remained of the basketball board and tear it from the wall. With a dull growling of a million guttural beasts it heaved the metal frame at JJ who effortlessly avoided it and tossed his ball back at the beast's skull. It blocked with one of its hands, though the hand was broken nearly off of the lithe wrist it was on, and painlessly advanced. Its long arms made self-conscious reaches, using their own eyes to see everything, and to see what they could utilize against this uppity prey they faced.

One such eye saw Mort come charging in and turned itself around to block his advance. A jagged-toothed mouth grew on the inside of the palm and dagger spikes split through the skin of each finger tip to fight against the challenging man. "These things are beyond my understanding...." Mort concluded. He swung his shovel into the hand's grip and then jerked it back to thrust the spade into the mouth that opened to him. The hand shrieked and withdrew most of its spiny growths. It balled itself up into a fist and tried to draw away in defense, but Mort close in and grabbed it. He took the whole arm, his own arms constricting it, and bent the wrist over his knee to break it. He jumped up and slammed it against his leg, feeling it bend but not break, and repeated again.

"Yo! Watch it!" JJ shouted. One of the arms was reaching for Mort from behind.

"Cover me!!!" Mort shouted. JJ dribbled twice and tossed his ball into the hand, hitting it far back, beyond its stretch, and had the ball returned to him. Mort leaped up high one last time, powered by the sheer force of will to break, and when the wrist met his knee met the ground it snapped and the hand fell limp and dead to the side. Mort threw the arm to the ground behind him and ran from it, knowing that if the arm still worked the hand could be used as a spiked flail against him. The monster did just that and swing, the hand Mort broke from use covered in spines and spikes and dagger fangs as the mouth opened up to make a hole of the whole palm. Mort felt the breeze of the fates and dodge-rolled underneath it, coming back up in a slide while facing the great beast. He was first awe-struck with its enormity and its catastrophic appearance, then steadfast in his power and self-defenses. He armed himself with a shovel and slid backwards to stop beside JJ.

"Man" JJ began, "if this hadn't happened I would've won that game, man."

"Of course" Mort said. "However, on must ask, just _what_ is happening? Do you recall anything like this ever being here? Something so entirely inhuman on this plane of human suffering?"

"Hell no" JJ admitted. "I know little kid-demons drew shit like that on the walls when they were bored. Then the big guys came around and killed them right there, no question no noise. Just dead and blood everywhere."

"The 'big guys'?" Mort asked.

"Let's wait until this thing's dead to talk, my man" JJ said. The beast threw a light from the ceiling at them. It now stood with ten arms up and open, the skin between the shoulder joints stretched into fleshy webbing that leaked a constant dark-brown meaty substance.

_Is it alive?_ Mort wondered. _This thing is beyond me, I know. But still, I want to know what it is. How does it exist? Can it communicate or think? What is this grand beast of mayhem and humorless destruction?_ The skull's mouth opened again. Out flew the tongue, piercing the floor between them, missing them both as it squirmed its way back into the open jaws of emotionless fury....

* * *

In the Purgatory where Force prepares to meet Force, two men rush together against a team of eleven in a high-stakes live-or-get-fucked game of total, raw power. One man is sheer brutal carnage, capable of plowing through and stomping over the dead bodies before him many times over, while the other is a nerd, the evolutionary fodder for jocks everywhere. But that nerd came prepared. He has a sword, a gun with no ammo, and a body that can endlessly contort itself without breaking a single part in its perplexing bends and twists. He fears not for broken bones or snapped spines for his cannot, but their's can.

Tom made a daring and powerful leap nearly over the line as they clashed. Four-Eyes. Held back the beast with the ball while the others converged around him.

"It's a down when something dies!" Four-Eyes shouted. He bents his wrists forward and snapped the blocker's shoulders out of joint. Tom spun down behind the beastly guardian and stabbed his long sword into its back along its spine, then fell down and fleshed the whole bony structure into the open. Four-Eyes made a powerful kick with his knee that toppled the creature's body backwards just as Tom kicked into its back and grabbed at its spine as it shook out of its muscular frame. He yanked and ripped vertebrae from each other, severing the link to the brain, causing instant death to the behemoth.

The ball was free and in the air. It hit the ground and began to skip around while Four-Eyes was held down by the force of ten men. Eight of them departed once the fumble landed and ran for it, stopped only by Tom who made a dive with a stretch of his serpent arms to take the ball in both palms as he hit the dirt. A whistle blew. It was first down for the guest team by means of a fumble. The behemoth guards casually moved back into place. The game clock had been stopped and a huddle was called quickly between Tom and Four-Eyes. Four-Eyes grabbed him by the back of his sleek suit and stood him up while the ball crawled along spider legs to the proper yard line for the next play.

"Good job" Four-Eyes began. He set Tom down. "Alright, we've got one of their guys on the bench. That was good thinking, ripping out his spine like that. Good strategy."

"Not sure that would hold up in a real game" Tom said.

"You got any bullets?" Four-Eyes asked, glancing at his gun. Tom shook his head. "They don't know that...then again, they don't know what a gun would do if it _were_ fired. Still, we can use it. These things are stupid sheep-fuckers. They can't tell one thing from another. Here's the plan: I'll snap you the ball, huddle into you before they get to us, and we'll trade off. I'll carry the gun like it's the ball and they'll come half at me, while you carry the actual ball and the other half will go after you."

"Fuck that" Tom said.

"While we're running" Four-Eyes continued-

"No" Tom demanded. "Fuck that. With a chainsaw, fuck that shit! I'm not charging into...those things with a ball in my hands! They'll kill me, and then _you'll_ be down a man. **Forever!** Fuck that!"

"The play is over" Four-Eyes lowed "when something dies. Anything. **One of them or one of us.** You think I can't kill something quick enough to get us another down?"

"Then why not give you the ball?" Tom asked.

"Then my hands are holding the ball" Four-Eyes said. "You want to try killing one of those gorilla mother-fuckers on your own, be my guest kid. It won't happen. You can't get behind them unless they're attacking me, and if they attack me **they DIE!!**" His bark signaled the return of the clock. They glanced up to the brief toot of a whistle and the scoreboard now mysteriously hovering in the air above the abyss of the guest-team endzone.

"When'd that happen!?" Tom exclaimed.

"Run the ball" Four-Eyes said "as far as you can. As long as you can. If you can get it across the field, drop it down. Got it?" Tom took a second, knowing the time was of limit, and nodded. They both clapped and broke, approaching their positions with Four-Eyes in front and Tom behind, ready to catch the ball once snapped as best he could with his feeble skills. Yvonne watched from her empty sidelines and paced around, taking in the scenery of the bizarre and inhumane new area. Signs were held up cheering the home team of mindless monsters while berating and jeering the opponents, in this case Tom and Four-Eyes the demon. The cheerleaders across the field continued their enthusiastic routine with nobody watching, shouting demonic chants in an upbeat tune while kicking their lithe legs and flashing their matching underwear everywhere. Yvonne scowled and moved to a broken bench to sit.

"Could you move over please?" an exasperated man said. Yvonne shot up to her feet and saw the bench, though broken, occupied by equally broken ghosts of men in football gear. Aged men, some trim but strong and others with a gut backed by muscles in their arms. Old men watching the game with distant and nostalgic faces, ghosts of a team long past.

"What are you all doing here?" Yvonne asked.

"We're the ghosts of a team that lost" the man closest to the end of the bench said. "We all challenged these guys in our hay-day physical forms and lost, and now we're cursed to remain as we were when our bodies were at their weakest."

"The very same days when we celebrated our state championship's 20th anniversary" another man said. "Looking back, it's ironically sad."

"That was the same day as my mother-in-law's funeral" another man said. "I got divorced in attending it, but I never regretted it....I guess I'm an idiot."

"This sucks" a man, with permed hair and a great body, said. He stood up with a stomp and stood in front of his team, more of a man than any of them with a body that remained a football star's body. "I can't believe you little pussy jackoffs! What kind of men whine and bitch all the fucking time about losing once? We won once and you never let it go! We lose once, _once, __**ONCE,**_ and you try to kill yourselves after you know you're already dead!"

"Look who's talking!" a fatter, bearded man exclaimed as he pushed himself to his feet to shout with passion. "You had a heart-attack at the strip-club we went to right _after_ we won the championship game! If anyone's gonna talk down to us, it's not gonna be you, Clive!!!"

"Shut the fuck up, fat asshole!" Clive shouted. He tossed down his helmet and put up his fists. "I was a boxer in high-school too, remember!? I'll kick your undead, fat ass!!!"

"I was a Hell's Angel after high school!" the fat man said. "I'll rip your throat out."

"**SHUT UP COCKS!!!"** Yvonne shouted. Her voice carried with it an allure, a rage that couldn't be ignored. All men turned their full attention to her as her body and mind synchronized to exude an impassible presence. "Who cares about your past failure? You failed. Suck it up! Lose the game but not the lesson. Isn't that the inspirational drivel you supposedly had shoveled into you since you were young!? Is that not how you live your life!?"

A whistle blew and the attention was called to the field. Four-Eyes stood, one arm broken at the elbow hanging to his side, in the middle of a huge bloody pool of blood. Tom had outrun his pursuers and fell down onto his hands and knees to vomit as he hyperventilated.

"Fuck" Tom rasped, vomiting again. "I think I have asthma!"

"Look at that" Yvonne demanded. "There are only two men out there and already they're nearly at the end of the field! And they've killed two members of the opposing team!" Four-Eyes barked and growled in pain as he gripped the broken space of his arm and fed it with energy and blood. He sucked it in from the air and into his pores, absorbing the red all around him and cleaning the fake grass of the field of it until he was fully healed. The body was eaten by that same grass and it sunk down as if it dissolved until it was no more. Four-Eyes rolled his neck with many loud cracks and wound his arm, fully healed, around as he jogged back to where Tom and the ball were.

"You want a chance at glory?" Yvonne asked. "Even if you ride the coattails of a truly powerful being to get there, will you accept glory? Or will you show up those two overachievers and let them know what real men fight with? Will you let them do what you never could and win or will you **step up, stop sobbing and grow some god-damn genitals!?"**

"Let's get in there!!!" Clive shouted. He put on his helmet and ran onto the field to join the guest team of two already in formation. The others still sat, mesmerized by Yvonne's presence, and engulfed in her power. She rolled her eyes and pulled at the collar of her shirt to show her cleavage.

"Win and you can see them" she said.

"**FOR GLORY!!!!!!!"** the men shouted. Helmets on and pads equipped they stormed the field. The team of two was now strong at eleven, thanks to the ultimate cheerleader Yvonne, who scoffed as she saw them running with the high hopes of tits being shown in their minds.

"I've shown them enough in this burdensome place" Yvonne said as she took the bench. "Maybe I'll do it...maybe not. I'm sure I can sedate their boyish lust long enough to work some civil and sincere help in getting out of this fucky place..." A Time-Out was called. Four-Eyes gathered his team against their nine-strong adversaries in a huddle of strategy. A hush fell through the crowd as the excitement swelled on the field of battle...

* * *

Against all his better knowledge of the arcane and mysterious, Sam rose up his gun in defense once more. The man appeared before him and took the weapon from his hand, then returned back down the hall between the lockers where he had been a second earlier before Sam could grab at him. The rigid gun shook and shivered under the pressure and tension of an unseen force but ultimately it stayed solid and in its perfect, holy condition.

"What would drive a man" the demon said "to have such a weapon made if he doesn't believe in God or demons?" The man tossed the gun back along the floor where it slid right to Sam's foot. He kicked it up, grabbed it and swung its dense frame through the air, never taking his eyes from the man for a moment. He thought intensely for a moment and aimed his gun in gesture rather than threat at the man in the darkness.

"How long have you been here?" Sam asked in all wanting seriousness.

"What a clever question" the man said. "What makes you think I have any title to answer it? Are you sure that even I know how long I've been here, or if I've ever been here long at all? Perhaps I entered shortly before you, outraced you and those others you came in with, to surprise you into submission."

"And even in that scenario" Sam said "you have only been actively stalking after me, as if you think you can take the claim to any other life lost in this godless place." The man's smiled widened an inch and hit Sam with discomfort. He lowered his gun. "Who are you?"

"Hmph" the man scoffed, closing his grinning mouth. "Didn't I say I wouldn't answer to cliches?"

"No" Sam said. "I wasn't even asking you. I don't need to know anything from you to learn the truth...." The man glared at him while grinning, right through the opaque lenses of Sam's mighty frames, and saw into the inhuman glare that his eyes shot out.

"Those eyes of yours...." the man said. "They ring familiar somehow. How they are there, where they came from, the scent I seem to know. Yes. **Our powers are not unalike.**"

"What powers?" Sam asked. His better senses warned him to dodge, and being one to follow all orders Sam immediately jumped and rolled away as the wall behind him was blasted open by the obliterating force of some unseen explosion. He rolled up onto his knees and saw the man walking into view, calmly and coolly, retracting whatever he had used slowly into the moving sleeves of his narrow-armed jacket. Sam stood up suddenly and fired. The man stepped away from the bullet and let it tear through the walls like they were mere plastic to the shell. Sam scoffed and started in a run away, keeping his mind keen to the changes around him. The man, from behind, leaned forward and let his feet leave the floor. He charged through the air flying and kicked Sam in the lower back when he was close enough.

Sam stumbled down into a roll and jumped up into a spinning kick to counter his attacker's force. The man blocked Sam with an arm and pushed him away. The walls behind him seemed to be humming in a low tone, but Sam could tell that it was the same arcane power flowing at him like a flood. He continued retreating in quick dashes backwards and avoided the swift winds of arcane strikes being thrown at him. An unseen and impossibly complicated power was against him, and he only knew that his own power would suffice to quell it. He took off his glasses and stood straight.

Nothing was there. In his almighty vision he saw nothing before him but that man with an incredibly dark outline of aura surrounding him, brightening his already paled skin and adding a shine to his steel-sheen teeth and eyes.

"There are forces in the world" the man proclaimed "that are not truly of human understanding. Great forces that overpower the minds of nearly all living creatures. Would it shock you to know that an entire race unlike anything living ever recorded once lived on Antarctica? And that they are still there, preserved perfectly in ice, **sleeping?**"

"I'm in an infinite high-school populated by demons from out of Hell" Sam said. "Nothing is going to shock me anymore."

"I have seen the world reform from its primordial, disgusting state" the man declared. He began to hover in the air, pushed up by the darkness as it turned solid beneath his feet. "Even now, the disgust remains, though enhanced a degree, from what it was. Men eat without purpose and fornicate for sheer pleasure. The idiocies trump and triumph over the true knowing and intelligent time after time. The weak are made immortal while the strong suffer to survive. All that hold enlightenment down are praised by the men who pull the world's strings, forcing all the people to sing anthems to a higher justice that hasn't existed for centuries, to men they don't understand!"

"Is there a point to this?" Sam asked. The man was lowered by the darkness and walked over to Sam, no threat in his body but a pulsating presence of pure rape in his face. Sam backed away and confirmed the threat of his gun by holding it waist high. "I'm not privy to your roundabout guessing games. Who are you? What the fuck is this place!?" The man grinned and extended out his arms. The darkness extended with them, **crawling and clawing at the air.**

"This is Purgatory" the man said "and I am its master. **Damien Satanicus Thorn, the Elder Son of Satan himself.**"

"....elder?" Sam said. "How many anti-Christs can there be?"

"Not that" Damien said "but a greater being I am. I was born out of hate and respite. When my father left heaven to make for himself a better system of the afterlife for the pitiful humans of Earth, he created me in the image he used to take as an angel before he was cast from heaven by outrageous angels. I am a God-like entity that overpowered the designs of my father and gained free will to do as I wished. The accounts told so often of the Devil's hand dipping into the fountains of man's purest wells are all false, for it was _I_ who inspired true evil to take root in the world. My father simply wanted a peaceful and regulated life leading his own 'second kind of Heaven' for those too stupid to accept a greater power to control them, where they could exist with or without meaning perpetually and sedate each other with the tales of their life as they had lived. I saw no meaning in that. I wanted to destroy it all, both Heaven and Hell, for being such flawed and useless systems!"

"So you made this place?" Sam said. "Out of what, sheer will? Or hate?"

"This place was here before I" Damien admitted. **"From where, I dare not venture, but something more evil and precedent that even God himself erected this place out of nothing at all."**

"And it's a high-school?" Sam said. "No, wait, this place only takes the form of whatever endless torment is associated with in the viewer's mind, right? To me, that's not necessarily high-school, so it must just go with a majority of collective thoughts on the matter."

"Of course not" Damien said. "That'd be absurd." He lowered his arms at last but the darkness remained reaching out, scraping against the walls and crawling across them like living oil, **like tentacles tangled together.** "This is how it was when I found it. I used my substantial power to simply force souls here that go neither to Heaven or Hell immediately. All those whose morals are of indecision are trapped here eternally, or until they gather in themselves the fortitude and power to escape and become demi-Gods of terror and rage."

"And then you sick them on Hell" Sam said "which I assume lies just beyond all those mountains in the distance."

"That's right" Damien said. "It's about time you got on track."

"So let me summarize this" Sam began. "You're a whiny bitch of a boy who got pissed that your father's work wasn't going as well as you thought it should. That being the case, rather than try to reform his business plan or implement your own and force him into early retirement, you made your own company so obscure no one knows that it exists until they're already here, being beheaded and raped through their neck-holes for eternity, or whatever, and then they think this is Hell by association. Meanwhile, in the actual Hell, it's much tamer and against what you want it to be so you send the 'reformed customers' of your service over there to rip shit apart, all eventually leading up to you doing the same in Heaven because your intentions are exactly the same as your fathers."

"I'd defend that I'm neither whiny nor a bitch" Damien said. The darkness surrounded him. **"I am simply powerful."**

"But tell me one last thing" Sam said, preparing to run and fight. "Our powers....how are they similar? How could you know that?" Damien did no answer, but through the darkness Sam could see his teeth and eyes and the warped smile of madness they made. The crawling darkness reached for him with hands of twisted moving tentacles, all dark and deadly and alive with an unknown and constant moving life of hatred and torment. Sam ran, keeping his eyes on his back, down the hall devoid of souls, on the King's Level of Purgatory where the lord of the realm presided...


	81. The Happy Noodle Boy Returns

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Madness, rage, depression, angst, sorrow, bereft, emptiness, boredom, evil; all things negative did once pass through him and made him not only homicidal but maniacal as well. He is Johnny, a human reborn with no purpose in life, death, or anything apart from those two. He has since found a way to live without purpose, abandoned all he was born and allowed to live for, and still he walks and kills with no regard to form or order or any please structure of similarity. A man was killed by him with nothing but a stab in the back. A man somewhere else was yet killed after being skinned alive and hung from the lowest railings of a suspension bridge in a part of the country no one knew such killings to exist. From the purely fantastic to the gruesomely true, Johnny has killed many and taken all their lives with little more than a bored smirk or a falsified sense of duty to keep him going.

Yet this thing was mad. Johnny knew well, as an artist, nothing he made would ever die so long as there were idiots to remember it. An idea is impossible to kill, all the same for a memory or any given collective series of thoughts. Yet this thing he did indeed kill, the amalgamated monster of sheer indescribable dimension with a poorly drawn head, the monster that was Happy Noodle Boy, risen as a best of madness from the walls of the eternal purgatory. With knives in hand, Johnny stood against the writhing mass of grotesque-ness with little more than battle-ready apathy on his face.

"**DOOOOKIEEEEEE!!!!"** Happy Noodle Boy called. Nny glared at it. He turned and ran, unwilling in the end to deal with such a nonsensical problem as that. The face of all his personified hatred chased after him with its immense, monstrous body trailing quickly behind. Johnny turned a quick corner and encountered a hall of wandering, blood-mouthed zombie children.

"Ew!" he exclaimed. "Tiny peoples!" Johnny leaped over them like hurdles, avoiding them as much as he could to keep his pace quick, and then was accosted by a dark-haired demon of ash skin and deep black holes for eyes. She grabbed him and pinned him by the shoulders to the wall, laughing with grotesque perversion at him.

"I've got you" she said with a coy and provocative giggle. "I've really got you now! Heeheeheeee!!!"

"No you don't" Nny said, offering a psychological barter. "You only _think_ you've got me. In reality, you have nothing at all. You and I are in fixed positions in this universe, and no amount of physical proximity is going to change the true distance between us." He had hoped the girl would surrender her false hopes and let him go long enough for him to stab her in the head, but her grin and lifeless eyes stayed the same.

"I've been watching you" she said. "I think **you're smexy as hell!!!**"

".......smex?" Nny repeated, utterly lost and confused.

"You're so skinny!" she exclaimed. "Like, really, reeeally skinny! And I love your trench coat. How'd you get it? You steal it and killed the clerk, didn't you?" Nny took a second to notice something about the girl. She was wearing black clothing, she was anorexic, and she had various piercings in her face. The black emptiness around her eyes wasn't that, but rather a very heavy shade of black eye shadow that bled into the cracks of her dry, ashen skin to give a deeper appearance. Her mouth was the same way, black with make-up.

_Oh I see_ Johnny thought. "Well then, could you turn around for a quick second?"

"Uh-uh" she denied. "I don't want to stop looking at you _evar!!!_" And so she was pierced through her back of her skull. A spidery spike of a leg stabbed her skull apart from between her eyes, which flew out of their sockets and away to the ground, then picked her body up and threw it back while the head of Happy Noodle Boy waited to take her place of extreme closeness and pin Johnny to the wall with its verbose and nonsensical shout.

"**MMMMMMEATBAAAALLS!!!"** Johnny ducked away and ran down the hall. The stout zombified children were running away as well, in fullest flight from the terror they dare not understand that chased after them. Many mouths of dagger fangs extended from the rubbery appendages all over the thing's "body" extended and sucked up the bodies of demons all around. The children cried out in absolute terror and pain as they were eaten and chewed voraciously until they sounded off no more in the terrible maws. Chaotic tubes grew from its fleshy mass and were spotted with holes. They blew out breaths of wind and played a terrible, cosmically-infuriating melody of deranged, psychotic fluting noises that bordered on astral rather than simply unreal. Trumpets blared from body-parts unseen. The godless creature took up the whole of the hallway and crushed the lockers which lined it as it traveled after flighty Johnny.

"**Oh, but if I only had a banana**" lamented the insane voice of Johnny's lost moronic anti-self. **"My nerps! MY NERPS! They'll take a cheese grater to my nerps! Not to mention the time I stood in for a clown at a kid's birthday party. SHIT RIGHT ON THE CAKE!!! Now THAT'S how you do in your alligator, I'd say. He'd never listen, though. I always talk but I never get listened to. WHAZZUP WIDAT!?"**

"Was it always this fucking annoying!?" Johnny remarked. "I did do it just to get people to stop fucking making me, so it's supposed to be horrible. I just hoped I'd be immune to the bull-shittery that thing spouts." Two tentacles grew out from the amorphous beast's hide, both of deep vein-like purple and tipped with gnarled metal spears. Somehow, Nny was able to sense something coming his way, even though he couldn't tell exactly what it was or from exactly where. All he knew was that death was behind him and he had to get further ahead. The hallway ended a fair distance ahead, three rooms forward almost, and it ended with a portal. A window where lighting flashed through was Nny's prayer unasked already answered.

_I'll do it_ Nny thought. _I'll jump. If I die, then fuck it all. I'll be dead. At least I'll die knowing I never have to listen to that goddamn voice again as long as I'm not alive..._ Without any mark of hesitance, Nny jumped through the glass, stabbing it away in mid-leap, and was cast out into the falling rain as the parade of silent, soulless bodies marched down below. _Oh bullshit. I was only on the second floor?_ Nny's fall didn't last long and he managed to land foot-first on top of a head. He walked across the gathering, moving mass across the way and landed in the grass, watching the procession continue unimpeded. None of the glowing-eyed terrors acknowledged Johnny in the slightest, a plus in any situation, and another solid victory for Nny to quickly celebrate with a smirk and snarl of a laugh.

"**YOU WON'T RUN IF I'M A CHEESPUFF!!!!"** screamed the Noodle Boy's face on its snaking neck. Nny looked around and saw an unopened door marked 'boiler'. He shrugged and opened it to be hit with the sweltering heat that sent an odd chill through his body the same as it painfully heated him to a sudden sweat.

"Shit that's hot!" Nny exclaimed. He groaned as he tried to press forward but pushed away in protest from the door and ran around the side of the building in the rain. "Fuck it! There's bound to be more fucking doors!" So Nny ran, out in Limbo, out with the bodies having no souls or memories or life at all, just another being like them and unnoticed by them completely. His grim vision of a lost memory went back inside and began the random wandering of the halls with its tongue stupidly hanging out. With no Nny there was no purpose for it to rant, and so it was silent of its mouth yet still noisy and maddening of the rest of its body...

* * *

Still, against the same monster did these others fight. Mort and the resurrected demon JJ, with control over a ball representing kinetic force itself, fought against the same pitiable manifestation of Human Negative in the gymnasium court. While JJ's youthful sense of ignorant bliss comforted him as he fought the gruesome beast, Mort was constantly mortified over the unknown terror of the construct he battled. A great centipede creature with arms like human arms ending with human hands, and a mouth utterly terrible to envision.

He saw no weak point, no escape, and no way to fight it but with pure brute force. Moronic as the plan seemed, Mort derived how it could work and endlessly compiled his methods in his head. "Damn!" Mort exclaimed suddenly. "Nothing works! How can this thing be fought!?"

"I'm doing fine" JJ said as he passed and passed the ball. The creature blocked with a different hand each time and let the others quickly recover. The arms and fingers that had been just previously broken by either Mort or JJ's efforts in battle were already repairing as well, the bones slowly moving back into proper place and the digits moving erratically.

"I cannot fight it like that" Mort said. "Its head, or somewhere near where its head _seems_ to be, has to be its weakest spot if it has one. It would be nothing but a false hope to think that I could indeed bring my fight to it, much less bring it into my fight."

"So fight it somewhere else" JJ suggested. "It's got a huge, long body to attack, you know. Pick a piece and go to town, man!" Mort looked over at the rest of the beast's body. It was not protected by any kind of shell. Its flesh was all rot and sick along the length of its great and evil-looking hide. Mort nodded and ran behind JJ. The beast spotted Mort making a move and attacked, shooting out its piston-quick, worm-like tongue at him. Mort jumped away from it and landed right beside the beast's fleshy hide, delivering a flying jump-chop with the spade of his shovel as his feet planted hard. The worm tongue of the monster shook in the floor it was rooted as Mort swung and attacked. JJ saw an opportunity to strike and took a step towards the offending appendage to deliver a point-blank power pass. The entire beast squealed, retracted its tongue and held all its arms up to its face. One by one, the arms returned to their original squat stance and the creature lowered its head onto the floor to rest.

"Yo, Mort!" JJ exclaimed. "We did it! It's weak! Check it!" Mort turned away from hacking through flesh bone and meat with his shovels like axes to see the accomplishment. The beast was down! His time had come! He sheathed his shovels and drew Gore, the great chainsaw of unending carnage and death, with a nefariously vindicated grin on his face.

"Let us rush, JJ!" Mort shouted. JJ nodded and ran forward, dribbling his ball close to the ground with rapid, hard slams to build up its energy. Gore roared to life and sent Mort in a rampaging run forward. The best shook its head and looked over as JJ jumped in front of it's vision with his ball held close at his chest.

"Check!" he said. The ball traveled with such great power and speed that the skull-mask was fractured and tiny shards of it began chipping apart. Then Mort, his own roar of battle deafened by the conquest cry of Gore, jumped up and slashed his mighty revving chainsaw straight down, breaking the skull apart, leaving the fleshy creature to writhe and toss its head around in vehement pain. It screeched in a noise entirely unworldly, one that no beast Mort ever knew or could conceive of could possibly make at will, or eve in pain, and then it began a rapid movement around the floor. It crawled on its hands, hissing like a mad, giant cockroach, and encircled the two together. Mort reserved the power of Gore on his back once more and stayed the violent warcry of his favorite weapon for a brief time as he planned for the creature's newest pattern.

"It's gone mad?" Mort said, unsure of himself.

"I think it's just trying to trick us out, man" JJ said. "Just stay on your toes and stay loose. How high can you jump?"

"To the edge and back again" Mort said.

"What?" JJ asked.

"**Of my existence**" Mort answered. **"I can jump as far as the end of the Buddha's palm and then back again all at once!!**" JJ just raised an eyebrow and gave Mort a curious, rather strange look from over his shoulder, then returned to tapping his fingers against the skin of his ball held tight to his chest. "You uncultured little...." Mort mumbled in defiant angst. Suddenly the room's air was ruptured with the echoing roar of the beast. It suddenly shifted course from its constant circle motion and came straight at both men with its 'mouth' pulled apart by four hands. Mort and JJ were initially completely disgusted by the gesture and what it resembled, especially with the worm-like tongue still wriggling with in its moist tunnel of a throat.

"That's damn nasty, man!" JJ exclaimed. "That just ain't right!"

"Damn you, Freud!" Mort cursed, a more eloquent and high-brow curse to the sick nature of the imagery currently charging them. JJ jumped, an astonishingly high feat for one who claimed humanity. His demonic body was already tall and lithe enough to jump much higher but he saw no need. Then he looked down and saw that Mort had not moved and the creature's gaping hole was close.

"Yo, get together man!" JJ shouted. "Jump! Dodge, do something! **Jump, man!!!**" Mort's eyes were closed. The winds of fate were all around him, pulling in one direction and then pushing against it in another. He saw through his mind's eye where he was in the universe, near the edge of an event horizon overlooking a swirling drain where the blood of the sacrificed is taken away into dark and abyssmal nothingness.

_Here is not where I belong_ Mort thought. By will and by thought his reality was augmented. The leviathan charged past empty air and rammed into the wall, shaking more of the hanging displays that held back even more unrivaled, powerful demons within the glass seals. JJ noticed them shaking and snapped his fingers with realization. Mort, meanwhile, fell down from the rafters after having never jumped at all and landed on the beast's head after it had blindly rammed into the wall. He took his chainsaw out and effortlessly cleaved straight through its body, landing on the floor while the creature reeled as far up as its arms could push, the gaping wound of exposed fatty flesh and randomly emassed muscles spraying a fountain of sick-scented blood into the air. Mort stood in the flow of time slowed, able to see his hand and all its features before even the first drops reached the peak of their arc in the air and began to fall.

_Where I belong_ Mort began _is yet to be determined. The winds of fate are ever churning around me. Only when they are calm and still will I know, by where I stand, my place in this universe. Until then, I shall always move, always be aware, always set myself afoot across the universe. Come what may, I shall master my existence. This unknown entity before me is little more than a question to answer. My only problem is that it is being asked in a foreign language...._

"Yo!" JJ shouted, waking Mort from his meditative stupor.

"Gah!" Mort shouted. He was startled out of his mind and jumped back upon seeing JJ's face instantly, his charisma broken. "Sorry" he said shamelessly. "I was thinking too hard, couldn't hear."

"Well listen now, cuz" JJ said as he spun the ball he held on a straight finger. "I think, if we're gonna start fighting monsters together, we're gonna need a bigger team. So how bout we start up the drafts?" JJ tilted his head to the skewed display rectangle of binding for a name he could not read containing the picture of a young light-brown skinned woman with an afro holding a volleyball under her arm.

"I see" Mort said. He nodded and grinned. "Wait.....volleyball?"

"You're the philosopher, man" JJ said. "You tell me why a girl that good looking isn't playing ball with me?" All this while the monster roared and crashed its bleeding head into the walls of the gym, held back by its long and strong arms and its will to live, to conquer, and to kill without reason...

* * *

No one had scored yet. Still, the crowd cheered in victorious chants and rhythmic stomping shouts for their home-team, the emotionless guards with bodies like brick walls, wide and tall and completely unfair to all their opponents but one, the man with Four Eyes. The demon took command of his team, newly formed with plenty of fodder, and had them huddled in for a strategic meet.

"Alright Tom" Four-Eyes began, "you're the quickest of us, you're the most agile. So you're going to be the running back."

"That means I have to catch the ball, doesn't it?" Tom asked.

"No, man" one of the veteran ghosts said. "That's the receiver, obviously. Or tight end. Your job is to take the ball from the QB and just run with it."

"Right to a touchdown!" another man exclaimed.

"That's another thing" Tom said. "How do I get a touchdown when the endzone is just a big, black hole? Don't I have to make contact with the ground for it to count?"

"Just step on the line and drop it in then?" Four-Eyes said. "Know what? You'll figure it out. Now, for the rest of you, we're going to play a very focused offense. Tom gets the ball and fucking runs with it, that's basically it. The rest of you are linemen. We don't need to do anything risky using tight ends or receivers or multiple Quarterbacks. All we need to do is not kill or get killed while Tom gets across the field."

"That's easy for you to say" one of the ghosts said. "I mean, look at you. You look like you could be one of them, you're so damn big. What can we do? The second they lay a hand on us, our heads just go pop!"

"That's what I thought you'd say" Four-Eyes said. "Try not to concentrate on how pitifully weak you are. Instead, just focus on how unrelentingly powerful and sadistic these bastards are and how stupid their means are to any end. They just swing to grab or punch or punt and expect you to die, but they aren't smart enough to make a legitimate genocide plan like us. I'll handle time-control and stop the clock at the drop of a pin to gain us some ground. Tom, all you need to do is run until you hear a whistle. If one of us dies its a down. If one of _them_ die, it's also a down. Unless we can get a first down each time, the field should be clean of blood. You all got that?" The team, as cowardly as some of them were, withheld their comments of the impossibility of his ideal plan working out and simply nodded. "Alright, break!" The team moved into its line and the play clock began its count down. Four-Eyes was the center and the balding man behind him the QB. He would get the ball and Tom, who stood behind him, would run up and snatch it as he began his run.

_So it's all up to me?_ Tom thought. _Is this his way of saying something to me? Like he respects me or at the very least has some strange faith in my ability?_

"HIKE!!!" Four-Eyes shouted. He snapped the ball and immediately blocked the rushing beast of a being. The others held their own against the gargantuan fiends, their legs buckling and their feet dug into the dirt as they were pushed back by the single-minded giants. The QB held the ball behind his back and Tom grabbed it, holding it tight to his chest. He jumped onto his back, then onto Four-Eyes' shoulder, then onto the wide back of the lineman blocking his way and ran down the slope of muscle onto the grass.

_I guess I have to take the trust and run with it_ Tom thought. He held the ball tight and ran as fast as his genetically bred ninja-speed legs would carry him. The beasts broke away from the futile defense of the weak ghosts and ran after Tom, sprinting far and slow on their stocky, muscular tree-trunks of legs. Tom didn't notice how much ground separated him and the nearest rushing lineman, but it was enough. Four-Eyes eventually broke from his hold and toppled his foe flat on his back, leaving him down and ignoring the demonic urge to finish the job as he ran after the others and Tom down the field.

"All the way, kid!" Four-Eyes shouted. **"TAKE IT TO HELL AND BACK!!!"** Tom grinned as he ran. The yawning gap of complete nothingness was just before him, an impending and frighteningly wide space without space in it, a hole into a deep, cosmic void. He focused on it and the white line of chalk-marked grass that divided this world with whatever world the endzone was, and he stomped a foot right on that white line. He spiked the ball down and watched it tumble into the infinite blackness without any hope of returning, and he heard the whistle blow followed by the jeers and disappointed calls of the crowd in the stands. A touchdown, and a perfect one at that. Four-Eyes was in his own stoic celebration of flipping off the jeering crowd with all his fangs exposed and his eyes glowing blood-red while Yvonne jumped and cheered on the sideline.

"How'd we lose?" a cheerleader of the home team wondered. "I mean, those guys are gigantic! And the other guys...aren't!"

"Maybe size doesn't always matter" said a cheerleader, ironically the one with the biggest and least logically proportionate and perky bust. The other girls glared at her and wen berserk, kicking her down and beating her to death with their pom-poms. After she was bloodied and her skull cracked open they shed their feminine guise and grew sharp, mangled teeth and began voraciously tearing her apart for her ironic blasphemy. Yvonne watched across the field in confusion while Four-Eyes continued flipping off the mist in all directions. The beasts angrily left the field to be replaced by the offensive team, neglecting to stay and attempt to block the extra single-point kick that the team set up for.

"That was amazing!" one of the old ghosts cheered. "I felt unstoppable when I held that huge thing back!"

"Even though they totally overpowered me" another said "it still felt like I was doing something great!"

"This is it!" another man said. "This is what we've been waiting for for so long! This is what we were lacking! This is the joy and heart-racing ecstasy that is true football!"

"How do we get the ball back?" Tom wondered. He shrugged and turned away from the horrible black abyss. Behind him a new kind of horror wound itself up from the crevice of unlimited darkness with the football in its ethereal grip. A skeletal hand of pure blackness rose up from the depths, surging with a dark mist of energy, and held the blinking ball carefully between its thumb and index finger. It rose up behind Tom and hovered behind him, going just past him and casting its great shadow over him. Tom turned with a start and saw the great, grim phantasm lower and drop the ball to the ground. The eyelashes of the ball, its white laces, grew into spider-like legs and it crawled across the ground and set itself up near the goal line again for the extra point to be set up. The great black hand retreated into the darkness with a near-silent whoosh and left Tom's mind utterly blanked and screwed.

"Let's get this kick in" Four-Eyes said. "I'll do it, Tom. You just hold it down, alright?" He smacked Tom on the back and fell him flat over. The other men chuckled at Tom and helped him up to move into position.

"Great job on the play, guy" the balding man said.

"You're fucking fast" Clive exclaimed. "You play sports much?"

"Actually" Tom said "I'm just a naturally athletically bodies gaming uber-nerd."

"Ah" one man remarked. "One of _those_, eh?"

"There seem to be plenty of them around here" another man said. "Most of them are trapped in conflict of what they are. You know what you should be right now?" Tom stopped walking and looked down at his hand, the wretched tool that he could twist and bend in maligned angles at will.

"....No" Tom answered. "I really don't know anything about myself anymore..."

"What you should be" Four-Eyes declared "is holding that goddamn ball up! Laces out, kid. Laces-fucking-**OUT!!!**" As always, the demon's rage shook all human concerns from Tom and he snapped from his existential funk and into gear. He held the ball in place, laces out, while Four-Eyes lined himself up to kick it. A net was raised, despite no goal post being present, and the demon kicked it. It no sooner left the ground than did a blur of rapid white and blue appear from off the field, run across the width and make a leap to block the ball with a slap. It went into Four-Eyes' face and hit like a punch, the force of his own kick doubled-back onto him, and he grinned as he turned his head to the interfering force.

"What the fuck is that!?" Tom exclaimed, ready to draw his sword. There stood on the field a vision of a man, a true football godly icon. His body was taller than Tom's by not more than a hair but his muscles were large, his body was taught, his armor only added to the dazzling degree of sheer awe that stirred the crowd of mist and even Tom himself into a state of admiration. The perfect body masked by a deep-blue tinted eye-shield stood before them, the number he bore being the square root of 2, fists on his hips in triumph.

"The defense team is all muscle, no mind" Four-Eyes explained. "The offense team is muscle, mind, heart, soul, fury, peace, guided power under the hand of a god-like manipulator. The offense team isn't as strong, but they're smart and cunning and fast as all hell."

"So....." Tom began, "they _are_ stronger."

"Yup" Four-Eyes said. "To you. To me, they're just shorter. **They're necks are that much closer for my arms to rip off!**" Despite the obvious joviality that the demon spoke with, something sat uneasily with Tom. The absolute glimmering perfection before him didn't strike him as something he could kill. In fact, for once, he felt scared of this paladin figure, and for once saw something that could very well bring him an end in the infinite stretch of Purgatory he had thus far run. An angel with the hidden face of a devil; nothing is more dangerous...


	82. The Blind Idiot God's Chosen Son

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Sam reached a peak in his run when he realized how alone in the lonely hall he had suddenly become. There were no lines in this private sector. Not doors or windows, but still lights of them just around corners, that when turned, had nothing at all but more unfulfilling promises of escape. Sam panted and ran again for yet another hopeless try at a window and came face to face with a swarming horde of silent zombies as they all flooded in from the hall he was headed to. Sam doubled back and ran from them in fear, knowing now they were chasing him as well. His options were to run back the way he came, down a hall with light from who-knew where, or down a hall so dark he couldn't tell if there was much hall to run down.

"Well fuck that, obviously" Sam said in regard to the dark hallway. "I _know_ what's over there." So he ran the other way, the zombies behind him, and suddenly the darkness behind him retracted as well into the black halo behind Damien Thorn's back. He smiled his steely grin at the moving, lifeless bodies and threw an arm forward. Silently many of them were cut in half and their torsos flew up with organs and blood splattering and flying out as well. The rest of the horde ignored it and chased after Sam in a silent but quick shamble, stepping on the dead bodies as if they weren't there.

"This realm" Damien began "exists in a balance, a perfect and harmonious balance of power using the natural human instincts of survival to heighten that sense of balance all the time. The souls of humans, corrupted and damned and heavy with sin, are trapped within this infinite castle as a part of it, while the bodies that brought those souls, all their good-will and humanity and their thoughtfulness and compassion, are left to rot a lonely and eternal death in the unending rain outside. There is nothing here above me, in thought or in power, as no soul can simply grow by eating alone. They must feed all their hungers, primal _and_ human, to grow to be truly god-like in this place."

Sam wasn't listening. He was too far away, so how could he, even if he did want to feign interest. Still, Damien's power reached far, and the distance between them was but a blink of an eye to the powerful man. He appeared at Sam's side as Sam watched around a corner, but was caught by his eyes and his punch missed its mark. Sam countered by grabbing his arm and holding it straight across his back, hooked by the forearm and bicep between his two elbow-joints, and he pushed into it to break it.

"You" Damien said "are such a being in this world as to contest me. If you ate some demons before getting here, maybe you'd be a little stronger, though a little more damned as well!" Damien countered simply by pressing back and bending his elbow. His strength overpowered the display Sam forced and threatened to break his spine before Sam could fracture his arm. Sam groaned suddenly and sharply with pain and released himself. He stepped away, keeping his all-seeing eyes on Damien, and caught his next fist in its flight. Damien just smiled, an obnoxious snake-like smile, that narrowed his eyes and curled all the way up to his ears. He followed his arm forward despite Sam's best effort to stop it and threw him into the wall. Then the darkness came and surrounded Sam.

_I won't be afraid of it_ Sam said. He opened his eyes wide and let the power he did not know of surge out. It hit against the darkness like a light he couldn't conceive, and drove the darkness back behind Damien's back in a resplendent black halo of floating signs and sigils of purely Satanic origin. An unholy pentagram, the mark of Satan, appeared in the air and pulsed out in a bloody red light. Damien held his arms out and smiled while Sam stood up and simply brushed off the pain with a roll of his shoulders. _This power of mine won't frighten me anymore than his does._

"You still don't understand" Damien said. "That's pitiful. There are few things sadder than a man attempting to wield a weapon he doesn't understand, and among them I can think of a brace few..." Sam embraced his inner horror and shot an eye-beam at Damien. It missed and blew a hole in the wall leading to another hallway, and Damien was disappeared when the light died down.

"........huh" Sam said. "Well, what do you know? I have laser-eyes now. It'd be pretty stupid if, after all this mystery and development, _this_ was the peak of my true power." Sam looked to the side and saw the zombie mob he'd nearly forgotten about. He stirred up the power from within and obliterated the mass of the zombies. All at once there were merely legs walking and draining blood just above their belt-lines, taking the final steps their nerves commanded them too before the realization sank in that the brain, and all attached to it in the torso, was no longer there. In effect, Sam hadn't just destroyed, incinerated or pushed the bodies apart with his power. Each hit was one that seemed to have been perfectly cleaved apart, like a digital-image cross-section cut-out of one's midsection in holograph form.

Sam's eyes didn't destroy, they _**decreated.**_** All mass and matter they blasted was removed from reality and placed in some crossing of worlds Sam dared not attempt to contemplate.**

"How arcane" Sam said with a sigh. Seeing no better recourse, and more zombies yonder, he entered the hole in the wall and ended up in the same hall where the horde had first chased him, looking down at the mess Damien's dark shadow had created when it killed all the bodies out of his sight. "I must have hit him....or maybe not. He knows what I can do better than me, so he must be."

"**Above you!?"** Damien called. Sam looked up, but he wasn't on the ceiling. Damien turned the corner in a half-run and wound up a punch. Sam moved his head back down and glanced a powerful blow Damien's direction. A hole was silently blown in the wall and for just a split second a tunnel devoid of rain was drilled into the horizon, lit up by sudden lightning. Damien dodged it with a desperate dive and grabbed Sam's legs in a ground-level tackle. Sam fell down and was pinned to the ground by the darkness. Damien stood up and put his hand to the wall, sealing it with a bloody patching of super-fast skin repairing, leaving a discolored round scar in the flesh of his mighty kingdom's living structure. "Of course not" Damien scoffed. "That'd be....absurd, to be above you to assault you. No. How would I even get there."

"Listen you little shit" Sam began in a demanding, grunting, growling voice. "I don't know who, what, or why the fuck I should care about who you think you are, but if you don't let me stand up I will rip out your trachea and use it as a fucking fleshlight before I jam my shins down your opened throat and clog dance with your_** RIBCAGE as my SHOE!!!**_" Sam breathed heavily after that, and slowly the darkness receded. Sam stood up and closed his eyes, still able to see but unable to 'fire'. "You....fucking did this, didn't you?"

"Hmph" Damien scoffed. "If only. These _things_ of ours are under their own command. The signals they receive to act upon are of no reality you or I know."

"What do you mean?" Sam growled. "Don't you fucking fuck around, chuckle-fuck! I want to know, straight, what the fuck these powers are!"

"......fine" Damien said, reflecting Sam's impatience with an ill humor and the first flat mouth and sternly furrowed brows he'd ever been seen with thus far. "If you can understand, _truly_ understand, then I shall tell you in such a way that your human brain won't rot on the spot and fall out of your ears."

"I'm listening" Sam said, slowly opening one of his eyes of absolute dark chaos to show just the slightest glimmering of distant stars within it.

"From reaches of the universe unknown" Damien began "beings exist, and have existed, since before we knew existence as a whole. Such demons created the order and the chaos by which the cosmos is balanced, and one such demon has granted you power. These are the Great Ones, the Elder Ones, the _Ancient_ Ones whose life preceeds all of time. Within your eyes you hold the power of the Sultan, the grandest of all beings. **You possess the eyes of a Blind Idiot God, the chaos in the midst of mad flutes and demon drums. _AZATHOTH._**" Sam knew, at that word, the mercy by which Damien walked upon a razor's edge, for he could feel the presence when it was spoken, and he could feel his throat close as if her were drowning, and his nose immediately bled upon the utterance of such a reviled term.

"......shit" Sam said. "Of all the writer's I've never read, Lovecraft had to be one of them, huh?"

"......." Damien began. "How would you know if you never read him?"

"I get around enough" Sam simply answered. "And so you, what about you? If mine's the Sultan....thing, what's yours?"

"The Messenger" Damien said. "He walked these halls before even I arrived, killing without warrant and inciting an inhuman madness in all he touched and observed. A chaotic fool killing time without reason who took to my body to preserve his godly essence until the time It called for him." It, obviously, meaning Azathoth, for pity on Sam's fragile mind and body. "This darkness, the crawling claws of rapture across the infinite sky, is _**Nyarlathotep. **_**With him, I can make the darkness material, and rend bodies with it..."**

"And compared to mine" Sam said, his eyes open and glowing colors outside the human spectrum and appearing only as black surrounded by violet, "**You're just shit! Both of you!"** With knowledge in hand Sam once again made a hole in the wall, just as the other one had finally begun to heal, and he felt a tremor beneath his feet. Damien laughed in the echoing void of his mind and filled him with stern anger. He put on his glasses and began walking, his footsteps the only sound in the hallowed, hollow halls....

* * *

The madness was far from over. The great wyrm still lived and writhed around with its gooey flesh body stained bloody red. It squealed with the shrieks of no earthly being, but still, unmistakably it shrieked in pain. It took four of its arms, those closest to the gaping wound Mort had sawn open, and took a hand to its open tongue-hole. They stretched it open and let out four whole thick, worm-like tongues which extended straight up and then clamped down on its body. They hooked into the soft and membranous flesh and lifted up the veil of skin that covered its insides. Beneath that rotted flesh was a tower of moving skulls, half-covered with flesh and bleeding muscle, all hissing and gurgling and making disgusting noises in a nightmarish cacophony. The heads attached to the arms had them spat out of their mouths, the skulls themselves small and shaped like pressed, ripe grapes with tears streaming from their eyes as the arms moved freely.

"Hooo!" Mort shivered. "That's a whole week of sleep I just lost!"

"Maaan, that's fucked up!" JJ shouted. "Just fucked..._up!_" The faces all opened and screeched at the two. All the legs extended up to their full, lithe length and those still acting as legs extended out like spider limbs to drag the beast's belly across the ground. The faces all drooled blood that leaked down with gravity to its belly and provided lubrication to its still intact skin as it streaked its way across the gymnasium floor.

"Did it eat the flesh it peeled back?" Mort asked. He and JJ looked up to the top of its head where the tongues were retreating, and with them the skin they had peeled back, down into the thick gathering of skulls acting as the beast's disgusting throat.

"What I wanna know" JJ began "besides if bleach will work on my fucking brain, is how we're gonna get this chick up here free."

"Last time was an accident" Mort admitted, "though a happy one at that. Couldn't you just break it open?" The beast charged and separated them. JJ leaped left and Mort ran right, brandishing shovels to beat the creature's reaching arms away. It swung three arms at him. Two missed and crushed the wooden bleachers, then the third grabbed Mort's Spade of Destiny and attempted to drag him away as it pulled him in with his shovel. Mort took Agony, his modern, tougher weapon and beat the demon's wrist to try and chop it off. It weakened and released with its hand broken and brought it back up to heal. Mort saw the shoulder-joint-face attached to the arm he broke begin to convulse. Its cheeks puffed up and then shot something into the arm, pulsing the skin as it traveled upwards. Its vomit grew a tumorous, disgusting growth around the broken bone and skin and then imploded back inward as neatly fixed skin in a healthy white shade.

"That thing keeps this stupid shit up" Mort said "and _I_ might vomit!"

"Yo!" JJ called. He passed his ball into the faces on the beast's tower of a body and smashed each one in with incredible speed and force. Noses were broken, teeth knocked from jaws, cracks started between empty eyes in skulls. He went to town with his range and drew the beast away. "C'mon, monster-man! My mama says you don't exist!" He passed again but this time in vain. His ball was caught in a four-fold clutch and crushed. The ball became nothing more than a flimsy husk and deflated. JJ scoffed and held out his hands, parted before his chest with just enough room for a ball to fit. A sphere of light began to form as all the energy in his immense body was channeled into the creation of a new ball, one made of pure kinetic energy, which he dribbled and bounce to gather more up in preparation for an attack. "That's right, baby. It's all free energy today!"

Mort, meanwhile, attacked the beast at its rear. He stayed off its blood trail, which stank of disease and sickness and vomit, while hacking through the monster's skin and chopping rapidly at the joints of its static legs. He huffed in time with his swings, one-two, chop-hack, until the winds overpowered him and he felt himself thrown back by their force. Mort recovered from his dodge roll and saw the legs no longer static but up and reaching for him, like the long arms they were. Mort brought both his shovels together between his hands and held them over his head like a mighty hammer, standing just within reach of the monster's enormous palms.

_The winds guide me_ Mort meditated _and they speak to me. Of all things. Of this world and all others. The winds, they sing to me, of all the seasons I've never seen and the men and women who never lived. The winds, they are me. My wind is fierce...._ Mort opened his eyes and saw the world slowed. The winds even blew slower than they should. He saw the hand reaching flat for him with fingers extended and moving anxiously, and without succumbing to the flow of time Mort smashed that hand down, and time resumed as normal. The hand was shattered, like a bag of blood, and parts of it flew everywhere. It was unavoidably off and the joint Mort had attacked was already damaged and vomiting into the sack of skin around it from the holes in its mouth. What did reach the arm was pumped straight out, a viscous globule with spots of blood and gobs of whole human bits from demons eaten earlier, jiggling on the floor where the arm laid dead.

"Ew" Mort said. Suddenly, the stench of madness overwhelmed him, and he turned to vomit himself, though with nothing in his gut he mostly dry wretched while the hands stayed away from him. "This is getting ridi-" interrupted by vomit... JJ circled around the creature's back, meanwhile, still dribbling his ball and gathering exponential energy. He had no exact plan, aside from keeping it distracted, and was unconsciously moving in place to make a shot for the glass barrier that held back the powerful soul of the volley-ball girl.

"Yo, Mort!" JJ called. Mort snapped up to attention with his composure regained and glared the arms back to the floor. The beast began to move again, dragging its long body across the gym floor in pursuit of the running JJ. "Set me up, man!"

"Certainly!" Mort called. He sheathed his shovels for the better use of his chainsaw and revved it up with its terrible howl filling the room. He ran forward shouting and sliced his wild weapon into the thin hide of the beast. He sawed apart the cloth-thin veil of flesh and splattered it away, then immediately began carving through the howling, angry faces. Blood flew with chunks of bone, a pure soup of red and white spraying as a thick, disgusting mucous of gore. He grit his teeth and pushed in harder, sawing through the howling mad skulls and separating a swath of fused bones and muscles, and separating the living, teary face-shoulder from the rest of the leviathan's body.

"RAAAAAGHHH!!!!!" he roared. One arm was off, and it was slowed by only that one arm. As it crawled along it tried to compensate by pumping the nearby limbs faster but couldn't reach its peak speed and curved off its course after young JJ.

"Yo Mort!" JJ called. "Keep this thing off my game!"

"With pleasure!" Mort roared back, revving his chainsaw with a buzzing shout. JJ lined up a perfect shot, still dribbling and building up the energy in the ball, while the monster came up behind him. He was in the zone. There existed him and his basket, the glass pane of the barrier that he had to shatter no matter what, and his defense was alone with Mort. The boy stayed in his world, surrounded by darkness, the only sounds the bounce of his ball and the squeak of his shoes. He huffed and breathed in a trance-like state, with the rhythm of the ball he bounced, and gathered up his powers as he lined up the perfect shot. Outside that world was the twisted hell he truly existed in, and closing in fast on him was the grand demon of crying skulls and howling madness.

In stepped Mort, with his chainsaw in mid-swing, from clear across the gym in a phantasmal feat of teleportation. He growled as his mighty weapon tore through solid bone and the meshing of stringy red muscles to cleave a nasty cut into the beast's underbelly of heads. He swung his chainsaw like a sword and stepped away when his blade was free, aiming himself and sizing his foe up for another amazing strike.

"You stay away!" Mort shouted. "Can't you see this young man is **into it!?**" He swung down and the beast advanced on him. It made a berserk crawl forward, into his attack, and pushed him back as the chain ripped through and through the meat and bone of the creature's disgusting true self. The skulls not being hit started howling anew and their empty eye sockets began to glow.

_We are....._

A flash of light hit Mort like a bomb and sent him rolling backwards. His chest was burnt, though the wound itself was shallow, and smoked profusely like a stack of leaves caught on fire. He struggled to rise back up from the blow and held a shaking hand over his burnt chest.

_It's hot as hell!_ Mort realized. He saw the skulls howling again, their eyes this time aimed for JJ. "No! **JJ!!!!**" Mort flew from his position and blocked JJ with his hands held out. He felt the flesh peel away and burn into the air. The hellish heat singed and burnt even the light, like a flash of lightning so bright and glaring in the middle of the night that one is left blind afterward. Mort withstood the pain and felt his body floating, his hands the only part still dry and blasted by heat, the skin all nearly peeled away and now the bone beginning to bake.

_We are....._

…_..again with mysterious voices in my head_ Mort thought. _Why must this go on, stranger? I have lost myself to the winds, and I fear that the winds have lost a sense of me. What must I do to regain my faith? What must happen for the cosmos to realign with me?_

"Hup!" JJ shouted. The light was suddenly gone and Mort's fingers were all bone and blisters and smoke.

_Where do these winds guide me?_ Mort asked. The winds spoke to him, not in a voice but with a grand action. He drew his hands to his eyes and saw them as they were, **his skin light but untouched in his hand, as if no force had harmed him at all.** Mort was certain he felt something scarring him, some powerful fire burning right down to his bones, but he couldn't recall it. All he knew now was sound: the sound of glass breaking. He looked to the wall, ignoring the demon, and saw the shards fall just as the ball lazily bounced its way over the demon's bloody trail and back into JJ's hands.

"Piece of cake, my man!" JJ said. "Piece of damn cake."

"**MOVE, DAMN YOU!!!!"** Mort bellowed. The skulls howled loudly and another brilliant flash conglomerated where they stood. Mort took JJ into a tackle and drove him away from the burning light. They both got up and made a daring race away, only to become at once encircled by the great beast's howling skull body.

"Shit" JJ cursed. "We're dead men standing. Think we can jump out of this?"

"No need" Mort said. He sat down.

"Yo!" JJ exclaimed. "You insane? You ain't no damn samurai master! You can't think your way out of this shit!"

"Patience, young one" Mort said. "Listen to sensei, and do as he does. Sit on the floor." JJ looked at him skeptically and followed wordlessly. They both sat with all eyes focused on them while two new shoes hit the floor amid the broken shards of glass.

"Bout time I was bailed!" a girl righteously shouted. "Now, it's time to **RAMPAGE!!!!" **And that was the beginning of nothingness....

* * *

Against perfection, what can the mites of men do but quiver and fail? Tom asked himself if he knew luck well enough to escape this swarm of perfection, yet his mind held no answer. It was already the turnover of downs, and the Home team's offense had the ball, faced against the ironclad fists of Four-Eyes the demon, the ghosts of failures on the field past and Tom, a confused young man with an unnatural body. A whistle blew. The first to charge was the offense team whose linebackers pinned all the others down but Tom and Four-Eyes. Tom ran after one who came through the defensive wall with a mighty sprint. Tom took his sword and made reaching stabs and cuts for his back, unafraid to attack and murder to break their charge in an instant.

Four-Eyes covered two men at once by running between them and observing the quarter-back's motions. "What'll you do?" Four-Eyes wondered out loud. The quarter-back drew his arm back with the intent to pass. His target was determined. "What'll you do!?" Four-Eyes shouted. The ball flew, right to the runner Tom was covering.

"Fuck that" Tom said. He jumped up and stretched his arm and fingers through the air to catch the ball. The man he covered stopped, skidding two lines with his cleated shoes in the grass a full yard long, and doubled back. Tom was falling too slow, and Four-Eyes was sprinting to his rescue.

"It doesn't count until you hit dirt!" the demon declared. "Once you do, **it's not a down until someone dies!!!**" Tom realized that, even with his luck and his condition of a body, he couldn't possibly cheat luck so badly as to ruin the chances of perfection triumphing over him. He knew that he was meager compared to the stunning display of arrogant power that ran at him and leaped toward him. He trusted Four-Eyes and held the ball in a tight grip with both arms at his chest. He was tackled out of the air and his back buckled into a broken shape. He hit the ground under the weight of the powerful and sinuous being in white and shimmering silver. Four-Eyes reached him in time to help and took the receiver's head in his hands. He smiled wide and madly and picked him up in a death-press grip between his palms.

"Grrrrrrrr**HYAAAAAHHH!!!!!**" The man struggled in vain, pumping his legs and reaching up to the manic demon's thick fingers. All was lost. It was a down. At the first vicious crack it was a down but Four-Eyes wasn't satisfied until he saw the blood shoot out the sides of the helmet and the chunks of brain matter come tumbling out of the front like a viscous bowl of tipped porridge. When he saw the gore, and heard it hit the grass, he was happy and smiled before gripping the corpse's throat and throwing it clear over the waiting, clashing lines and into the infinite void of the endzone. He looked over at Tom and saw his broken, buckled back and the lifeless horror on his face. He scoffed and shook his head.

"Not that I'm surprised" he said "but man, couldn't you wait a little longer to die?"

"Urgh! I'm alright!" Tom said. He swung his legs forward on the ground and snapped his back straight. He then got up, his arms still frozen in their protective grip around the ball, to try and wrench them loose. He shrugged his shoulders and twisted his back until, finally, his arms were limp again and the ball hit the ground with its spidery legs up and moving its body into place. Tom's arms were fine, his back alright, and all around his metal state mixed. He was glad he was alright, but not with the way he had become so.

"Well good!" Four-Eyes said, slamming Tom on the back with an open palm. "Keep that up until we win!" Four-Eyes strode back to his former place and took his position as the center guard against the offense team. There were no interceptions in this game, only interruptions and prolongations of the inevitable, much like the life of any man who may waste his life in the courts of deathless battle, prolonging their life while shortening it and distracting themselves from the worries that make a mind snap and bubble and rot under sudden pressure. Tom got up and looked at his hand. His fingers were still overstretched, so he returned them back to their normal length. Then he looked to the sidelines and saw Yvonne, frozen in fear, over what she'd just seen. Tom stared at her for a moment, feeling and accepting her horror, and then turned away.

He had a game to play. No time to pull at the strings of his heart with matters as unsightly as love....

Yvonne couldn't calm herself down. What she had seen had ruined the peace that she had in her mind, however small it was, that she wasn't alone. Here was Tom, a young man she'd considered pleasantly normal, one who had sided with her unrelentingly during certain times out of a hopeless pursuit of shallow romance, now a monster. He had been changed by this Hell, and she knew she had been too. Her memories, her powers, her true self had all awoken and drowned what she thought she was. The Yvonne that entered was dead in her mind. The frightened girl that she grew up as, the victim of unspeakable tragedies and terrors, the ultimate ironic heroine, who revived the man that drove her to insanity and amnesia in her previous life only to have him recollect nothing of his living life and submit himself to her unwavering will and protection.

_Good God_ Yvonne thought, hunched over her own body with shaking hands and tearing, wide, frightened eyes. _What is happening to us all!?_ Nothing good, at all.


	83. WeareallPowerful

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

The offense had switched. Now Four-Eyes took the ball to hike against the bestially huge defenders. The vanguards of the field, those fiendish and mindless walls of mass and matter in the shape of men. Tom was the running-back once more, the clinch of the team. He looked at his ghostly teammates and saw their state, broken and beaten but not submissive. They were still ready to fight, even though all of them was defeated, and their willpower was the only thing allowing them to stand upright. Tom knew this would be a fast down, and resolved to get as much gain as possible from near the half-field mark.

"Hike!" shouted the QB. The ball was snapped and Tom ran. The blockers held up feebly against the enormous force of the attacking linemen. Tom rushed past a tiny gap between the giant bodies and saw the ball arcing over them. Four-Eyes had pressed one of the defenders down so hard that his knees buckled backwards and he was stuck in place with shattered legs. Still, he swung his arms to grab and push, all in vain against the superior strength of the ruby-eyed demon man. Tom leaped up to catch the ball with another stretching, snaking reach of his arm and grabbed it.

"What now?" Four-Eyes lowed at his foe. The demon guard looked up. Its eyes were shining white through the pitch black shadow of its helmet. Some profuse amount of liquid began to pour out of the bottom of the helmet and began running down the beast's jersey. Four-Eyes raised a brow at this curious, unknown event and realized too late that the play was over. The ball opened itself up and stabbed the running Tom with its spindly legs to force his fingers off. He dropped the ball and stopped with a skid to see it shuffle its way a few yards backwards and stop.

"Shit!" Four-Eyes roared. "SHIIIT!!! This guy killed himself!!!"

"Oh well" one of the men said, falling to his knees out of pure exhaustion. "Better him than us, right?"

"Kill and kill alike, eh?" another man said.

"This isn't good" Four-Eyes said as he moved up to get to the ball. "If these fat bastards just start killing themselves to stop us, we'll have to fight the offense again! You want to risk it against those fuckers!?"

"Alright" Clive said, pounding his fists together. "If they try to play dirty, we need to stop them. If you see them making some stupid move to kill themselves, just stop them!"

"Kick them in the nuts!" another man shouted. The rest of the ghost team howled their strongest to the plan and picked themselves up. Four-Eyes could see it plainly, for his vision was double. These men were already gone, just husks waiting to be shattered. He could see that despite the mood they carried they had already lost. Just one more push, one more detestable rush, and they would die. In the end, the team was really only two people, only two individuals capable of making any real difference.

The ball was hiked and the QB ran back to throw it. He felt his body give way, absolute exhaustion overcoming him, and began to fall backwards. In his last conscious act he threw the ball blindly and as powerfully as his frail body allowed. Tom watched the ball carefully and ran past the smallest gap he could find, passively bending and collapsing his bones and organs to fit and then snapping them right back to proper place. The ball was off its course and going far to the other side of the field. Even with his stretching powers, Tom's reach would not get it before it hit the ground. One of the demon blockers observed the ball and pushed down the lineman he was holding down. Then the giant simply reached up his arm and the ball tipped off his finger.

"**CATCH IIIITTT!!!!"** Four-Eyes bellowed. Tom placed his better hand on the hilt of his sword and increased his speed. The ball wasn't his target now. It had come into contact but the pass wasn't measured. It was a fumble now, and whoever took it would claim the next down at the first death.

_I'll grab the ball off the ground_ Tom thought _and then kill him! Chop his head right the fuck off!_ Tom made this his adamant plan. On of the ghost linemen was broken down, his upper legs pushed through his lower. His shins and feet exploded with the sheer force as he was forced onto the stumps ending at his split knees to the ground. The giant on him continued to push at his shoulders until those collapsed as well, buckling into his torso and crushing his lungs as all the bones and muscles folded into each other. Then, finally, the man died as he was pushed down with such force that his neck snapped before his head even hit the ground. All this before the ball reached the ground, and Tom's plans were dashed at the phantom whistle.

_Fuck_ he thought. _Are we out of time!?_ He looked back and saw a comrade dead, crumbled up like wasted paper, and the behemoth standing over him, huffing out beastly breaths. Four-Eyes glared at him, but he didn't act. He snarled with his demon teeth and clutched his fists, flexing his mighty arms with the veins of iron toughness running along under his skin. Tom realized what had happened and saw the demon ball skitter back to its original position. _So this is...the second down?_ Tom got back into position. It was all he could do. His resolve was the same.

"Tom" Four-Eyes began quietly. "I'm going to pass straight to you. Get as far as you can. Don't worry if you can't make it the whole way." Tom felt honored and nodded. The demon was finally warming up to him, yet at the same time he was patronizing him with lowered expectations of his prefered performance. Tom saw only himself and the demon, and what was happening between them at that time. Their plan existed on the assumption that the linemen would hold up, that's what Tom thought. But Four-Eyes thought much differently.

_It's all up to us now_ he knew. _Tom, it's not a down until it lands and someone's dead. If you can kill before you land then you need to fly as far as possible. If you can't then I'll kill for you. If these faggots stop us by killing themselves, well, then there's that many less of them for you and I to worry about...._ The ball was hiked and Four-Eyes took it in his own hands. He had two giants already at him and passed the ball before stomping forward to punch them both square in their chests, throwing them back on their asses. Tom got the ball and ran so low to the ground that his legs could hardly move. He slithered between their thick, short legs like a snake and came back up in a rapid sprint with his sword out and forward. Four-Eyes jumped clear over the two bodies he'd thrown down and took a quick look back to make sure they weren't bleeding. Just then, when his guard was off, a giant came up from behind and tackled him.

"Shit!" Four-Eyes cursed. Another piled onto the first, and eventually the whole line was ganged up on that single body. So many uncountable pounds, maybe even tons, of pressure all pushing him down. Tom only saw the plan, and its destined end. He couldn't disappoint his comrade, his team mate, but that patronization he made was still burning his ears.

"I'll take it the whole way!" Tom shouted. "I'll run it all the fucking way!" And he did. With all the rest of the enemy team on top of Four-Eyes, Tom managed to run a perfect touchdown and threw the ball down into the unspeakable darkness far below. He turned victorious to see the horror of the men shaking themselves loose of the enormous pile and stomping down, like boulders tumbling from a mountain, until the last one pushed itself up off the ground and walked off the field. The crowd was cheering. Obviously, that was bad. Tom began slowly walking forward just as a great yellow shadow was cast over him, the enormous black beast of unspeakable dimensions coming up out of the void to return the ball yet again. Tom ignored the ungodly horrors that accumulated and formed out of vicious space behind him solely to focus on the crater where nothing moved. He waited, hoping, silently he was praying, for something familiar to stir up. Yvonne took to the field in a teary flight and arrived at the crater as Tom simply stood weak and helpless.

"Oh god" Yvonne said in a horrified hush. "You....Four-Eyes...." The demon's body was destroyed, but he remained alive. His arms had broken and the muscles burst out of the skin here and there, his chest was impacted and all his organs were pushed out of his abdomen which was torn open like the doors of a palace. His legs were otherwise straight but flattened into the dirt. His face was fine, save his flattened nose. Somehow he lived, the great demon he was, and managed to open an eye which promptly rolled out of socket. He then tried the eye below it and looked up at Yvonne with a grin. "What's the point of all this?" Yvonne demanded. "Why are you fighting!?"

"Hgggg" he growled. The opened his mouth and spat up a short burst of blood. "I think I need....a half-time....**refreshment...**" Yvonne stared at him, his unwavering confidence and unwieldy attitude. She saw, in his open eye, the look of expectation but without perversion. He looked not at her face but at her shirt, through the fabric and to the sustenance he so sorely needed now. Yvonne shamefully looked away.

"I can't" she said.

"You bind me to life" Four-Eyes said. "Keep...me...alive, and I will do the same...for you...." Yvonne lowered herself into the crater and carefully picked her head up out of the dirt. Tom just stood, no longer watching but staring blindly ahead, as Yvonne fed the demon again. Somewhere in the field of murder, Tom lost his mind, and now in a world of utter darkness he saw snakes slithering through the sky and a tree shading him from behind. A tree with **golden leaves and shining, pink apples, and a snake coiled around the lowest branch.** He saw this without looking, and without moving, and heard a grand decree as if from the voice of a heavenly herald.

_Now Lo, on the cosmic highs, comes the King in Yellow!!!_ Tom turned and saw, in front of that tree, a cloth of yellow draped and weakly blowing in the wind.....

* * *

The silent horde continued to invade. A huge pack of zombie husks walked through the halls, all searching for souls to eat, memories to recover, purpose to exist upon. Lifeless forms, simple creatures who made no sound at all in the halls but the parting of the breeze. A pack of witless demon children wandered the halls in an unguided manner, all of them lost yet sympathetic to each other. Each of them spawned from the realm itself, walking crayon drawings with their names printed right on their shirts, none of them much older than seven or so.

"Where are we?" a scared little boy asked, his fingers fidgeting and tapping against each other so much that they were worn down to bone.

"Quiet, Ernst" a courageous young lad said. He stood taller than the rest and with a narrow face of raw cut features. He had the aura of a leader, a young man that knew exactly what to do, and stayed at the head of the group with the strongest looking boys at his sides. "Asking where you are when you're lost is just a waste of breath! Now, it looks like we escaped those creepy things already, but everyone keep your eyes open!" The boys and girls all looked around in a fluster. A whole line of boys defended the rear, walking backwards and led on by those behind them so they wouldn't get separated. Suddenly a clanking noise came from one of the halls they had passed recently.

"Hold up!" one of the boys said. The whole group stopped, huddled up and tightened their defense. Some of the boys took out small baseball bats, others held makeshift blades made from snapped rulers. "Sounds like something is coming."

"Idiot!" the leader boy said. "Those zombie things are totally silent. We need to stay alert for them above anything-"

_**HHREEEEEEEEEE!!!!!**_ A demonic death-cry never heard before. It's voice was that of pain, suffering, joy and pleasure all at once. Around the corner, skittering madly on two blade-tipped legs was a fleshy abomination with a grim, wide mouth wide open and a razor-tipped tongue lashing around wildly. Half of its body was still around the corner, and despite how much it skittered it moved nowhere, it just made long scratches all over the surface of the floor. Then a sick snap was heard and the creature's body fell. It started to drag itself, the rest of its body just a bloody trail behind it as it had been torn in half.

"Wh-what is that!?" the biggest boy at the back said.

"Asking won't do anything!" the leader boy said. "Come on! Let's just run!" The children began running, but another noise stunned them in place. It was rather the oncoming of a grim silence, a deafness so loud that all other noise ceased. The demon's mouth opened wide and its blades hit against the ground in painful swings, but no noise came. This, the children knew, was the march of those mindless, lost memories of the limbo far beyond the walls. Sure enough, around a distant corner these myriad bodies came charging, mouths wide open and eyes blazing vicious yellow. The leader boy turned to the children and shouted silently at them to double back and ignore the demons. The children obeyed up until they neared the demon. It swung its sickle arm at them in a deft attempt to slay something before it died. When it missed one of the boys rushed up and held the blade in place while the other boy, a fatter one, swung its bat down to kill the beast. Its head, or at least its mouth, was crushed and bleeding, and the creature cased to move. The children ran around it and left it there for dead as the zombies came after them.

The leader boy was last to pass the demon's carcass in the crossing, and he was caught. He turned and saw a tentacle from some other creature had wrapped around him, and that the edge of the slayed demon's mouth was curling up. The kids cried for him, their voices nothing but the movement of their mouths, and he told them to hurry on without him as he was slowly picked up and taken into the dark hallway where the tentacle came from. It became darker and darker, with no light at all, and still the tentacle took him forward, keeping him high off the ground. Then, with a clamp, there was nothing but darkness, and the brave young boy felt a myriad of toothy stabs starting to pierce through his flesh and crush him. He was ground up in an instant, all his bones broken and the blood of his body pouring out...

The children had run their limit, for in their face was a bleeding wall that wasn't there before. All the noise masked by silence continued to escalate, all of it so maddeningly distant and forceful. The oppressing silence that the marching horde gave off amplified only the sounds of rain on distant windows the children were without. They all turned and saw the marching mass with soulless eyes and gaping mouths marching forward with arms outstretched. The scared girls and boys, who lacked all bravery and strength, wet their pants as the braver boys and girls took the front line with small inadequate weapons in hand. One of them shouted, in vain, to the frightened mass to go into the wall. He pointed at the wall, mouthing for them to go and go, but in their fear they were all paralyzed. With a silent curse he turned back to the crossing where the demon carcass was, the final threshold between them and certain death.

Then, from the blind corner of that crossing came a demon. It's body was as tall and as wide as the hall itself, all thick fatty flesh. It's head was nothing but stubby arms with six fingers each that reached and grabbed madly around, pushing and pulling along the walls like a demonic slug. Once the front of its arm-covered, hallway shaped body cleared the opening into the crossing its flesh seemed to pop out, like flesh spilling out suddenly of tight clothes that had burst, and its entire width opened up into a pitch black mouth bordered by long, sharp fangs. A worm-like tongue reached out and grabbed what was left of the demon carcass, dragged it in, and then with an audible snap the jaws shut and chewed the bones and flesh to pieces. When it was done, it grinned a wide and evil smile with a satisfied demonic hum.

The zombies were stopped in place. Their silence had given way to a more natural and awkward silence. The children cried and sniffled together and stood watching everything before them moving so subtly. The giant demon slug's flesh started to ripple, and its head started to shake. All the loose and fatty flesh shook with each move it made, each more spastic and rapid than the last, until it was a huge jittering blob of mad, fleshy matter. The arms all grabbed nearby skin and started to pull and rake it apart. Blood went everywhere. The beast lurched forward, throwing its whole body up and then down with a floor-breaking stomp, and separated the kids from the zombies.

"Now!" the new leading boy shouted. "Go! Go! Go!" The children all went into the wall, all into the same part of the wall, and fled through the realm's discrete tunnels through reality, all of their crayon pictures crying and scared. The stronger ones went last, trailed up by the fat but brave little boy with the bat. Just as he approached the wall he saw a shadow taking it up and cutting him off. He looked back and saw a man, tall and skinny, standing in the middle of the floor. **He had just suddenly appeared out of nowhere, holding a smoking revolver at his side and a grim smile on his face.**

"Now thaaat's entertaining" Nny said.

"Who're you?" the boy demanded.

"The Artist" Nny replied, slowly turning to him. "It seems that all of this...._**is my painting.**_" The boy became shock still with fear. Nny turned back to the great demonic beast as it trembled. Its blood kept draining away, its flesh melting into a sickly-colored pool of unhealthy yellow hue, and the thick wave splashed up against Nny's metal boots. The child stepped into the wall and left just as the floor began to flood, but he remained just behind the barrier of dark glass to watch. Nny hid his gun back inside his coat and crossed his arms, holding each shoulder with his head turned up. He watched as all the mass of the giant demon melted away, and then in its place there stood a new being. This one drenched in blood, its flesh shaped like a cloak around its body and a wide-brim hat decorated with hanging eyeballs and tongues on its head. The zombies saw it from the front. It looked up at them, the skin on its face taught and thin against its skull and two flashing orbs of changing colors and brightness in its eyeholes.

It took its hook-clawed nail up to its face and slit open its flesh from the bottom of its nose down to the bottom of its neck. The flesh parted to an open hole, for it lacked any lower jaw, and from that abyssal black throat a tongue with a crab-claw pincer slithered up and snapped once like nasty scissors. Then it stood there, its arms lowered and tucked inside its flesh cloak, waiting in the silence for the first noise to signal its fury.

"**Shine**" Nny said.

_**HHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!**_ The demon was off! It's madness was critical! It sped forward, raking through the mass of mindless mannequins and spraying their thin, dusty blood all over the walls. Heads were cut in half and thrown away, whole torsos were ripped open and kicked, everything around the creature began dying in a messy and loud rush of chaos and fear. The fat boy lost his bravery and ran through the wall to reach his comrades, but when he rounded the first corner he found them all dead, in a neatly stacked and bloody pile, with a demonic figure sitting next to them. This one was all flesh, from its pants patterned with eyes and screaming faces, to its face where its flesh from either cheek was stretch up and across its eyes and wrapped clear to the opposite sides of its skull. Its toothy grin of fangs was still there and freshly dripping with blood. On the wall, a picture of many dead bodies appeared next to the mad scribbling of a magic marker. It had no form, purpose, or intelligible design. It was simple some **mad scribble of black.**

"Insanity" Nny said. "So.....that's it, eh? The madness and hostility....is this what I carried?" Nny stood and continued to watch, ankle deep in blood and liquid-rotten flesh, as the fiend tore its way through the defenseless horde of zombies, snipping off heads with its tongue and crushing skulls to pieces in its powerful grip. It was nothing but splendor and gore. No purpose or substance, just a good venting of frustration by throwing color at a canvas.....

* * *

Sam walked calmly down the hall. He expected nothing but darkness to come crawling around every corner, no other fancy tricks or ploys to capture his attention. Sure enough, from around an unseen cut in the straight hall, some creeping shadow arrived and reached across the wall and floor for him. Sam tipped down his glasses to look beyond his human sight and saw a mass of thick, translucent tentacles, ethereal and powerful. He jumped back just as they spiked into the floor and began running backwards as they chased still after him. The floor was ripped away and tossed into the walls. Tiles and broken pieces of solid flooring flew everywhere, a cloud of debris. Sam took off his glasses and used his power, obliterating all the space before him so that nothing remained, and he drew his shades back on again.

"It's sort of a one-sided fight" Sam said, thinking aloud. "But that one side seems too flippant to tell who's really winning. My power is obviously better....but this place is quite dark enough for him to kill me before I realize it."

"It's just that" Damien said. Sam turned and saw the man, all prim and proper in his suit, floating just above the floor with tentacles filling the hallway behind him in a warped, alien transparency. "You're sharp. Even humanity has its bright stars. However, **they all burn out in time.**"

"Prose later" Sam said. He rushed forward, unafraid of the shadows, as Damien stayed fixed in the air. The tentacles holding him up began to move behind him and the entire hallway, not Damien, began to move forward, slowing Sam even as he ran full-force ahead.

"Let me tell you a secret" Damien began. "You see, these beings don't have any real method of choosing. It's all arbitrary to them. No glimmering saint will be given a power that a homicidal maniac can't likewise have. That is their nature. The madness that they control, the untapped potentials of the human mind, is all sealed away for their benefit only. God created the universe, this is true, but what then? Misery swept rampant as evolution sped wildly out of control. Those species that existed beyond physical means migrated together and became monstrous entities, Gods out of Death! Deus ex Nex!!! **Nihil Est Eternum!**"

"Cut that shit out!" Sam shouted. His eyes blasted out power, obliterating the space that held them apart, and in an instant he was within range of Damien to deliver a stern kick to his pelvis. Sam jumped up and spun a roundhouse knee into the demon-man's side and felt something split. He fell down and was sped away by the moving hall, holding his knee with the dear prayers in mind that he hadn't broken it at such a critical time. "You sound...like some punk....trying to sound cool by using Latin words....just to make a passing point....in a trivial argument!" Damien stopped the halls and stepped down. He was right next to Sam, and leaning over him with his hands behind his back.

"The evolution of the Gods came from an imperfect system" Damien said. "The evolution of all power is from an imperfect system. These beings, these Outer Gods, realized that, and began to fix the system by randomly selecting which worlds to experiment their true powers on. The manipulation of willpower, the materialization of pure darkness, the obliteration of matter, _**AZATHOTH**_, the power to control dreams and incite spells of enlightenment only known and understandable to be pure and unintelligible madness. These Gods were wise in their ways, **and I shall preserve that system. I shall perfect this universe, and all of its wretched parts, by holding that power cannot be attained by the self. It must be **_**given**_** by the stronger!"**

"So you want a world" Sam began "where you control power. That's understandable. Nobody would hate you for _that_." Damien looked intrigued. He backed up and rose Sam up with his dark tentacles.

"How would you say that?" Damien asked. Sam glared up at him, his eyes **normal.** Black and white, with no wide range of stars around them and no divine aura filling him. Sam stepped forward with a tight fist, glared with so much human rage that his face became frozen with it, and he punched Damien square in the jaw. The demon's teeth were moved and some broken off. Blood filled his lower lip and dripped out even during the punch as he fell to the floor.

"It's human" Sam said "to want to control power." Sam stood up straight, despite his knee, and blew on his fist. "In case you're curious, I used my powers just now to do just that..." Damien was shaken. His brain was so jarred and his vision so hectically blurred that he could barely move. He crawled up onto his elbows and barely got off his belly. "**...I erased our powers together!!!**" Damien's pupils shrank. _Of course, it's probably temporary, but I won't tell you that, you fuck._

"Hnnn?" Damien hummed, an eerie tone in his rising voice. Then the laughter began. He turned himself over, his mouth of steel-shaded teeth the only thing of his face visible, and he started laughing. It was quiet, sinister, and utterly creepy. Each laugh shook his chest and seemed higher and more mad than the last. Sam just stood and glared at him, and the shadows around them, waiting for something to start to move. Damien sat up and leaned an elbow on a knee, glaring up at Sam through the dark shadow over his brow, the demon-red of his eyes plainly visible.

"**Human......._me?_"** Sam started backing away. The powers were back, obviously, and Sam didn't want to be nearby when Damien's became fully activated again. He hobbled as fast as he could while the demon prince slowly rose up from the floor in a hover. The tentacles extended out of him and quickly surrounded him. His eyes were glowing bright with murderous red light and his smile had stretched across his whole face.

"_**THERE'S NOTHING HUMAN ABOUT MEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!"**_ At that monstrous call, that demonic shrieking howl, Nyarlathotep made itself real, and all the shadows of the dark and dismal realm began to move freely. From the walls, bodies formed, all in proportion the the shadow that they formed from. Small shadows had small skeletal masses crawling out as if covered in a thick, ethereal slime. Heads popped out and moaned with a mad, flute-like wind coming from their bony throats. Sam tripped and landed again on his split kneecap, forcing him to stay on the ground and writhe in pain while the monsters gathered even faster. Sam looked down the hall, where he ran from, but saw no sign of Damien. He only saw huge shadows crawling, forming even larger skeletal bodies that crashed into the sides of the hall where they couldn't be fit. Then he looked back and saw the same thing, though with more skeletons forming and crawling out from the blackness against the walls.

_Shit_ Sam thought. _I'm dead. If my powers are back, though, maybe I can at least escape to another level. _To that plan Sam turned over and stared at the floor. He stared at it hard until it wasn't there and immediately fell down through the ceiling, past the poorly wired lights and carcass-infested air-ducts common to any horror-high-school building, and landed flat on his stomach in a well-lit corridor of a different realm. He turned onto his back and looked up as the darkness began to invade. Skeletal hands started crawling down, and impish fiends were scattering across the ceiling. Little hunchbacked forms of globule darkness, like infant shapes made of shadows with gleaming, round-circle white eyes. Sam pushed himself up and stood up, keeping off his knee. The second he was up Damien was there, standing right in front of him with blood still dripping from his fat lip, and he kicked Sam right in his knee. Now, he was positive, it had broken, and he fell back with his eyes wide in a glare. He obliterated a straight tunnel through all the floors before him, right up into the raining sky where his vision could not reach. Once Sam's back hit he felt an extra force on his chest, like a shoe, pressing him down.

"I was born with power" Damien said. "I was granted more power. That is the way it should go. No one must exceed the limits of their living unless something beyond those limits allows them. And I will _not_ allow **you** to do _**that**_." He started pressing down harder. His foot began to sink into Sam's body, passing through the flesh, muscle and bone and fusing together the demonic leather of his show with Sam's own innards. Damien was glaring down at Sam with such a sinister smile that he hardly noticed when the rain began to hit him. Sam managed to push open an eye with the hope of pulling off a final shot, but then he too caught sight of the downpour.

**It was ash from the shadows, all of them dying.** Damien looked up dumbfounded at the sight and allowed his foot to rise up out of Sam's body. The human made a quick escape, crawling away and hopping on his one good leg while his other dangled helplessly from the knee down.

"So it's happened" Damien said, looking up. From the farthest, highest reaches of the hole Sam made, blood began to pour. Not from above or from any floor, **but from the very walls themselves.** "It's finally here....." Damien extended his arms and called back all the darkness to his body. He was surrounded in a thick and moving aura of pure black that outlined him at every angle. His eyes became concentric circules of red, gold, white and black all pulsing out in a random order, one at a time, no two colors ever directly repeating. He widened a smile and rose up from the floor, then looked down with his mad eyes glaring at the broken Sam in full retreat. _**"IT has awoken! This place...is falling!!!"**_


	84. The Nexus of the Same Person

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

And so, the great leviathan was defeated. All its skulls were caved in, all its arms broken into shattered pieces, all of it dead and bleeding and dead. Mort and JJ sat in the only ring of the floor not dampened with the monster's sick blood, a small area that had magically been immune to the flood as it all drained through unseen cracks under the floorboards. Mort stood up and took in a deep breath, ignoring the thick stench of blood, breathed it back out. JJ shot up panting.

"What the fuck just happened!?" JJ exclaimed in a panic.

"You're welcome" the girl said. She stood tall, as so as Mort, and was trim and fit as a model. Her arms and legs were taught with might yet slender and curved in a feminine way. She had a girlish body with narrow hips and a slender but perky bust and a magnificently round afro. Her skin was light brown, like milk chocolate, and a look of courageous protest burned in her eyes. She pumped an arm up in victory and hollered out into the gym with a loud and prolonged

"HOOOOOO!!!!"

"Damn" JJ said, awing at the sight of her. "That was some kind of luck we just got there."

"There was no luck in that" Mort said. "You see, I was more than aware of every condition around us in my enlightened state of being. What happened..." and he extended up an arm with palm opened upward, to proclaim the core of his enlightened statement, "...**was fate.**" And so JJ did the same, extending his arm up while constantly glaring at Mort, and held it there as if to say something of equal philosophical depth.

"That.....**is bullshit!**" he exclaimed. "There's no way you planned that far, man! Get over yourself!"

"Enlightenment is a tricky thing" Mort admitted. "It's sort of esoteric. If you don't achieve it, you can't really comprehend its logic."

"I don't know what the hell you're saying" JJ said, giving up and walking two steps away. "I'm just glad we survived."

"Then be glad to this girl" Mort said, turning towards her. The last of the thick blood drained away, leaving a red-stained gym floor surrounding them in the end. The girl lowered her arm and became cautious, turning down her cocky grin while still glaring self-righteousness at the men. "Tell us, please, what is your name?"

"Oh what" she began, "is this how you introduce yourselves? You just assume that I'm here to save you, and then you ask _me_ for _my name?_ Oh hell, it won't work like that, man. You better tell me yours."

"They call me Mort" said he.

".....what?" she said. "Why? You Jewish?"

"No" Mort said "though that would make...more sense."

"I'm JJ" said the boy, leaning down to offer his hand. "Thanks for saving us, girl. We got in a little over our heads."

"Doesn't seem possible for that" said the girl. "You look like _nothing_ is over your head." JJ grinned and modestly tipped his head a bit. "I don't have many memories of my living life, of course. I wasn't that lucky. After I came here they tried to break my body, then my mind and then my spirit, but I was too strong for them all. So they locked me up in here. They were afraid of me."

"I do believe _they_ now have something far more substantial to fear" Mort said, looking back at the giant broken corpse and all the blood.

"Yeeaaahh" she said. "What is that thing, anyway? It doesn't look like any demon I've ever seen."

"That is what I fear" Mort said. "I've not been here long, in truth, I'm not even dead. Still, this seems unordinary. It is a wholly different being than anything else existing in this Purgatory."

"It's messed up, alright" the girl said.

"So, could you tell us your name?" JJ asked, trying to be sincere.

"Okay" she said. "You can call me **Lammy**."

"......Lammy?" Mort replied, turning back from the carcass. "Really? Lammy?"

"I kinda like it" she admitted. "When they were trying to beat me down and find me some kind of eternal torture they took a gangbang of fat ugly demons to me and they all called me a lamb. I kill them all, though, so no big deal."

"Must be a really strong girl" JJ said "to be able to take rape so lightly."

"Oh, please!" she exclaimed. "That's just the kind of stereotype that gets me really riled! Just because I'm a girl, I can't take one unwillingly up the ass. Ha! I bet you'd break after you got something shoved up _your_ ass, if you even _have_ one, you beanpole!"

"I.....won't step into this argument" Mort said as he calmly backed away. _Although she is right. Girls are subjected to sexual stereotypes all the time. Men never truly consider the possibility of the traumatizing effects of rape because their idea of sex isn't __**in**__take, necessarily. Well, not a straight man like JJ is..._

"Just chill out, Lammy" JJ said. "I mean, it's no wonder they had you sealed up. You're strong, girl. You killed that thing and I didn't even see it, so of course your strong. That's all I'm saying, you're strong."

"Damn right I am" Lammy said, turning haughtily away to follow Mort. JJ gave her a distance of a few yards before he went after them again, drawing close in only a few steps with his massively tall form. Mort reached the door and tried it, but it wouldn't work. Somehow it had repaired itself and welded shut. The plastic between the creases was melted like wax and hardened like steel, reaching all the way down to the space between the doors and the floor so it couldn't move. And the windows were all black from the other side.

"We locked out?" JJ asked. "Man, we're gonna have to live in here, aren't we?"

"Can't we go through the walls?" Lammy asked. She walked up and tried to go into the wall, as she knew she could, but instead she drew her hand away at the sensation of something foreign and wet and saw her palm covered in unknown blood. "Ew! The wall's bleeding!" She shook her hand of the blood and tried to wipe it on the wall padding. Mort began walking in a fervent pace across the gym to try the other door.

"I got it" JJ said. He walked ahead of Mort, allowing him to slow and stop to ponder silently. The other door proved just as fruitless. JJ even used his motion-energy ball to ram against it, but to no avail. The ball simply bounced clear back and burst into light at its incredible speed against the opposite side of the gym. "Looks like we're trapped in here, man" JJ called.

"Perhaps..." Mort said. Lammy walked up to him and tapped on his shoulder.

"There's a door up on the ceiling" she said. She pointed up, but in no particular direction. "I know there is, I'm just not sure where."

"How do you know that it exists?" Mort asked calmly.

"When I was dragged in here" she said "to get sealed into the wall behind that glass frame, I saw a bunch of demons coming and going from a spot in the ceiling and there was a lot of rain pouring down through it. Since I know it always rains outside, I figured it must be a direct way out of here and to the roof...or something."

"You observe a lot" Mort said. "That's always a good thing. Alright, let's-" Mort stopped in mid-turn to face the rest of the gym. He, JJ and Lammy were on the clear opposite side of where all the broken glass and the two broken frames were. Standing in the middle of the gym, manifest out of nowhere, was another monster. A flesh-covered demon. A coat, pants, and wide-brimmed hat all made of taught flesh with dagger-sharp nails, just like the others. It's face, however, was not covered discretely with the rotted and sickly stretches of skin. It was exposed as a skull that was wide open and aimed up at the ceiling. It was frozen in a soundless howl. **It's empty eyes were blasting out pure white-hot light of rage.**

Then, suddenly, its roar became real and blasted through the gym as a force of wind, pinning all three others to the wall and splashing up all the blood around it in a misty red wave.

**_AAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!_**

_Damnation!_ Mort cursed internally. The noise stopped, as did the wind, and all the blood splattered to the four walls of the enormous room. Now came the sound of heavy and hateful breathing, the deep growling pants of a raging monster. Mort shoved himself off the wall and shook his head free of blood, the rest of the front of his body still dripping and soaked with the creature's sickening stench. JJ noticed after he freed himself from the wall cushion that the monster's body was actually completely gone now, as if it had been burst apart upon this new creature's coming.

"What's going on?" JJ asked. "What happened to the other thing's body?"

"Seems to have reconstituted itself" Mort said. "Any other explanation just defies rationality." Lammy pushed herself off the wall and stepped forward in a rage.

"**HEEEAAAAAHHH!!!!"** She roared. The monster dashed forward, its feet off the ground in a long leap that sent it clear across the room! Just before its dagger fingers could swing forward and swipe away the skin of Mort's face, it was blown backwards by a lethally powerful pushing force. It tumbled and slid its way into a corner and stood up, seemingly unharmed, taking the back of its hand to its shoulders and brushing itself off casually.

"You boys stand back" Lammy said. "I wanna get myself warmed up before the big game..." Mort and JJ looked at her, their eyes drawn immediately from her crossed arms and haughty, grinning face to her fro. **Arms, pale and thin, came from her hair holding pure white pearls as big as volleyballs. Pearls of pure energy, rounded and concentrated into matter, that vanished physically into nothing but pure driving forward force.**

"Damn" JJ said, looking at the aftermath of her attack still lingering in the air as the mist of blood stayed parted away from the rapidly-pushed tunnel of space. "It's like my power.....on steroids."

"In terms of metaphorical drug enhancement" Mort began "it's more like your power on PCP...." Lammy's justification for attitude was revealed: the power that killed everyone she met, the force that led to her exile in the exile Purgatory.

* * *

So Tom stood, in reality a mind-blanked shell of himself, gazing through the dark mind's eye of some insane monster that tapped into his subconscious mind. He gazed fully at what seemed to be reality, a reality that existed in the depths of his own head and heart, opened up by a cosmic darkness that slowly started to fill a smoke-screened sky overhead. Tom looked at the tree, marvelous and golden, bearing supple pink apples that hung down from sturdy branches, so thick and full and ripe that they all looked to be ready to drop in an instant. The snake coiled around the lowest branch stared at Tom with dreadful black eyes.

"What happened?" Tom wondered. He looked around in two swift glances, trying to see everywhere at once, but when he looked back his neck refused to jerk his head around anymore. The tattered yellow banner that hung before him in front of the tree was now held up somehow by a small wooden post in the ground and billowing in a tired breeze. Tom stared at that standard deep and fearfully, as if it was staring back at him. The snake slithered forward, wrapping its body one full coil around the tree branch, rose its head up and then stayed perfectly still, as if right there it had died.

"What are you?" Tom asked. Nothing happened for a great length of time. The yellow tabard draped over the wooden post hardly moved. Finally, the wind stopped, and Tom moved back. "I have to get out of here. I'm going insane!" At that he turned to run, but before he could get a proper lead in his flight a familiar voice started taunting him from behind.

"What a coward you are" spoke the voice he hated the most. "What kind of frightened little kid would run away from something like this? It's a tree, a snake and a worn old piece of cloth..." Tom turned slowly around. Now the yellow cloth was shaped more like a tunic that opened as a slit in the front, hung over a cross instead of a post. A snake-like, boneless and jointless arm reached and touched gently its fingers onto the top of that stake, and those fingers extended and slithered down like snakes carefully descending. All connected to the serpent, **Jormungandr,** whose body now extended out from the branch his entire lower half was coiled around, defying substance and hard matter completely. Tom became immediately infuriated.

"Fuck **OFF, FAGGOT!!!!**" he roared. His jaw distended without him knowing and he bared long, sharp fangs that dripped with poison. His nose shrank back into narrow slits on his face and his eyes sank back into his smoothed skull. **"GET OUT OF MY HEAD!!!!!"** he roared, a forked tongue flicking out reflexively. His face snapped back to normal with a look of horror as Jormungandr, having the same face with a seductively smooth and charming look about him, smirked just slightly and returned his fingers to their human length and form.

"Thomas" Jormungandr began, "what ever makes you think you're in _your_ head right now? This is no one's single mind. This is...**paradise...**"

"What am I doing here?" Tom demanded. Jormungandr took in a deep breath through his mouth, his tongue flicking out at nearly half the length of his whole torso and returning into his mouth quick as a blur. He started moving and held his upper body up straight with the rest of him nastily coiled around the thick lower branch of the tree. He held up both his arms and looked up to the upper boughs of the tree. Then, still looking down at Tom with his arrogant look of pitiless charm, he stretched his neck up and grabbed in his nail-fanged mouth an apple which he gulped down and swallowed whole. Tom watched it wriggle its way down his throat and became almost sick over it.

"This is a nexus of all evil" Jormungandr said. "A place where beings like us must come in the end. For you see, dear Thomas, you and I _are_ one in the same per-"

"Don't even try with that bullshit" Tom growled, a forked tongue barely making it out of his mouth to flick and hang about. "I'm different from you. For one I'm not fucking dead. Second, I'm not a fucking lunatic! Third, I have a life! I was never a mindless killing machine like you! I had a family, and a life, and an education that I gave up on halfway to continue living my life just the way I wanted it!"

"Indeed" Jormungandr said, swaying his body to a sickeningly hypnotic writhing wiggle. "And what was that life, hmm? Didn't you just **kill things everyday?**" Tom's tongue returned inside his mouth and became normal. Every day, for the greater length of his life, his emotions and mental cognitive abilities were strained and drained as his memories of all his gaming life went before his eyes. For any amount of time he spent running through an amazing scenery, there was a greater amount of time where he saw nothing but digital bloodshed and giblets of people flying everywhere.

_Oh shit_ Tom thought, realizing how very lost he was now. Jormungandr simply smiled and lowered his body down slightly, right next to the regal captain's coat hanging on a beaten iron bar propped up by two thick wooden posts grown out of the middle of the ground. It had tassels and badges all worn and rusted from countless ages past, and Tom realized at once that he and Jormungandr were not the only beings in this place.

"Hmmm" Jormungandr hummed, licking his lips hungrily. Something completely discomforting about his attitude swept Tom up in a heated fury and the whole situation became exponentially more horrible for him to be near. "Looks like you're finally coming to grips with it."

"It?" Tom said. He started breathing with uneasy heaviness. "What is...it?" he demanded between his breaths. Jormungandr tilted his head up and placed his tight fists on his hips....at his sides as his hips were technically a few feet away.

"This is the realm of an unknown fear" Jormungandr began "that this world has yet to understand! It's name echoes deep, like a crying infant trapped in a dark and infinite cave. It's form is intangible and ever changing, trapped in a space between the three worlds of time and without the limited guidance of the ten directions of space!"

"You sound like some kind of fanatic" Tom said, regaining some ground as a taunting force. "Didn't you used to be a strong, independent and individual being, not some cock-sucker cultist." Jormungandr stared emotionlessly for a bit at Tom, then suddenly things flashed and his face became indescribably demonic. He shot forward like a bolt and took Tom's head into his mouth, then began whipping his face with his lashing tongue.

The illusion ended with Tom's sword stabbed up, his mind in perfect control, and Jormungandr's arm stayed as the blade reached precariously between his stretching fingers. He scoffed and drew his arm away while Tom silently did the same. "You and I aren't the same. All this time, since I failed to kill you, I've been trying to give myself a reason to live. A greater purpose beyond this stupid game!"

"But you still haven't found it, have you?" Jormungandr asked. "Thomas, your place is here. This is the grounds where all men like us must gather. Did you know? **All cloned people only share one soul. That's it!** And we're not the first one's here. Each fruit on this tree represents a union that was once shattered by mankinds uncaring scrutiny, made whole again in _his_ court." He wrapped his arms across his chest and kept wrapping until they coiled around him twice and his fingers became tightly woven together. "Once you die we can all move on, all bodies becoming one at long last, and the soul of our genetic origin shall finally be set free in this ruined land!"

"Shut up!" Tom demanded. "You sound weird! Just stop fucking talking, you ass!" Jormungandr swung his arms out, extending and uncoiling them rapidly. Tom was forced back and fell over as he dodged the wild swing of the arms, and when he looked up he saw that yellow robe over him like a mountain that blocked the sun. Jormungandr's arms swung far back and hit the trunk of the tree. The branches of gold all shook and several fruit fell down. They burst as soon as they hit the ground into a messy puddle of dark red juice and chunky bits. Tom stood up and hopped away from one that came at his head. When it burst he heard a shrill noise, like the final squeak of a mouse as it's crushed under a soldier's heel.

"This is the convergence point" Jormungandr said "for _his_ sake."

"....Whose sake?" Tom asked, regaining his visual ground of Jormungandr and the ever-changing cloak of nightmarish gold. His eyes began to shake with fear as his body stood taut and still. "**WHO ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!?!?!?"** Jormungandr again smirked and started moving towards the tree. His lower body began to uncoil and regain its human frame and appearance. Tom, without thinking, stepped forward in an angry stomp to demand an equal ground. When his foot fell, however, he felt something foreign that begged his curiosity to look at. Tom slowly, cautiously, looked down at the fruity mess and saw, lying in a puddle of blood, **the crushed body of an unborn baby smashed around his foot.** Immediately he fell, toppled by panic and tumultuous racing anxiety, as he saw that from all the burst pink fruit came stillborn infant corpses with hideously disfigured faces. Swollen, half-opened yellow eyes and mouths that leaked constant liquified organs from within. Jormungandr took care as he walked forward, a monster Adonis clad in sheer arrogance alone, and crushed a swollen head underfoot.

"This is his realm" said he, the bastion, the keeper of words "where we reside. The complications of humanity. The unwanted existences. **The living abortion cases of all history, those that should have **_**never ever been..."**_ The words were getting to Tom. Insanity compiled upon madness and rage. In his fit of swelling emotions Tom transformed rapidly from one state to another, from a screaming and panicking young man to a writhing and shouting snake. His arms reached up at the sides of his head and his ears began to bleed.

_GET OUT!!!!!_ Tom mentally shrilled. _QUIT IT! YOU'RE RAPING MY MIIIIIIIIND!!!!!_

"Call as loud as you wish, Thomas" Jormungandr said. "There is no voice to quiet, no whisper secret enough, no place that cannot be found by the King in Yellow. Come to me, Thomas. Come to me...**and make us whole!**" And there behind the seductive soldier stood a being, clad in regal robes of a mad-shade yellow. It stood tall and strong, like a military man, with face obscured by a cosmic veil of alien pattern and fabric. It stood taller than any human height, but its head did not reach the clouds. At its sides hung arms that reached as far as the edges of cliffs and as wide as one liked them. Its hands, human in sight, were pitch black, even blacker than the shadows they came from within the robe sleeves. It was a trying sight to behold. Tom's mind quickly descended into a wide and dark gap. There stood a Great One, an Outer Being, and in front of it was an obnoxious messiah with naked arms outstretched beyond Tom's own eyesight.

The God of Horror. Lo, there stood Hastur, gatherer of many and holder of one. Seer beyond sight, vision in blindness. Defying descriptions of mortal men, such as I, the author, must attempt to make.

* * *

Four-Eyes finally stood, a man reborn, again, for what seemed to be a time he didn't care to keep count of, and all at the same extraneous body part of the very same girl who had before helped reraise him up from the ash and the mud. He stood just as powerful as before, with muscles unbroken and arms solid with demonic weight and intense sturdiness. His four eyes were glaring out with a bloody light and his fanged grin was shining as a brilliant, murderous crescent in the dark light of the solemn football field of demons.

"Haaaaahhh!!!" he sighed with a growling shake to his voice. "That felt good."

"Speak for yourself" Yvonne said, standing up with arms both wrapped around the same breast protectively. "That just hurts and hurts each time it happens! My breast's aren't meant for feeding!"

"Of course they are" Four-Eyes said. "Wouldn't Darwin raise quite a contesting point to that?" Yvonne puffed her face up out of rage and huffed herself away, tucking her shirt back down as she stormed her way to the sidelines. The cheerleaders were in awe over the rebirth, the magnificent vision that Four-Eyes carried, standing as a dark and statuesque tower of manhood. Muscles all rippling and taut, face full of warring drive. Everything about him was to be admired and lusted after, yet at the same time the demonic cheerleaders felt a twinge of hatred.

"Oh laugh it up, jackass" one of them lowed. "You're down to two people now! Let's see how long you survive out there against out three-point offense with _two_ people! Hahahaha!"

"Wait a second" one of the other girls said, eyes glowing white. "Since when'd you learn about football?" The taunter glanced over nervously.

"We aren't supposed to actually _know_ anything about this crap" the other girl said. Their teeth distended down and bore hideous rows of sharp, grinding fangs. "You're **not one of us!**" The cheerleader under trial fell down with her mouth wide open and eyes blank in defeat. She had failed her collective, and in doing so was devoured voraciously as the offense team took the field to return the kick. Four-Eyes opted without an extra point, feeling all the more triumphant and haughty with his revival, and lightly pitched the ball to Tom. It bounced off and knocked the boy over.

"Wake up, Tom" Four-Eyes said. "It's game time again. We're all that's left!" Tom did not move. In his eyes were fields of deep and loud static images. Nothing but fuzz and obnoxious buzzing. "Tom! Wake up!" Yvonne saw from the sidelines when Tom fell down. Part of her own heart seemed to fall with him, and she felt an unnerving twinge of abandonment. She too fell down to her knees and held her praying fists to her mouth. "**TOM! WAKE UP, DAMMIT!!!"** Tom did not stir. He was lost. Four-Eyes looked around at the broken corpses of ghosts, impossible as they were to actually exist, then up at the offensive team which had replaced the members he had killed in the earlier downs. Growling loudly, Four-Eyes took the ball and punted it straight up into the air.

"It's just me now" he said with an animal snarl. "Fantastic. Fucking fantastic! **THIS IS WHAT I WANTED, YOU ASS FUCKS!!!**" Four-Eyes thusly charged forth with the intent to kill and maim and obliterate things. He extended his rigid arms out and clothes-lined two of the rushing demon's down by their guarded throats. They hit the ground so hard the bounced and Four-Eyes followed his offensive defense by dealing a powerful roundhouse kick that sent one into the other, like evil billiard balls shaped like bodies. The one that flew farther hit yet another and took him out by the legs. The whole team moved back slower and slower, waiting for the ball to come down, unaware that Four-Eyes had kicked it so hard that it arced up through a tiny hole in the gigantic tarp that hung arcanely overhead and now the ball was trapped, skittering about on its self-conscious spider legs, trying to get its balance while staying above the approximate ground where it was supposed to land.

"I won't kill you all _now_" Four-Eyes declared. "But breaking you into pieces should do well enough until I can **kill you outright!!!" **Four-Eyes punched, kicked and threw wicked elbow-blows from man to man, body to body, until not a single one was standing. Then, all together, they hopped up and continued their play. **"You persistent FUCKS! Don't you understand danger!? I'M TRYING TO KILL YOU OVER HERE!!!!"** Four-Eyes took one up, clear over his head, and snapped his back like bad bamboo. The down was made. Four-Eyes snapped to attention from his heated, wild rage and looked with a start down the field, where Tom was. He still hadn't moved, but there were equally no signs of anything moving near him. Four-Eyes hadn't even noticed where the death was until he felt a warm rush of blood pouring down onto his shoulders. He looked up at the split body and then threw it down, in two halves, to the grass where it was absorbed.

"Shit" Four-Eyes cursed. "I need a new strategy. I need to move them down the field...." He looked to Yvonne, called a time-out and ran over to her.

"Is Tom alright?" she asked. Four-Eyes looked back and saw the giant darkness dispensing a ball at the fifteen yard line where the offense set up, waiting for their defense to take the field again.

"He'll be fine, I think" Four-Eyes said. "Since he's not playing they're not trying to go for him but...."

"What happened to him?" Yvonne asked.

"I don't know" Four-Eyes said "and it doesn't matter right now. I need _you_ to help me."

"What!?" Yvonne exclaimed. "How? I...don't know what to do! I'm a duchess! The only sport-related thing I've ever done was kill people with a baseball bat!!!"

"You have powers" Four-Eyes said "that are still waiting to be used within you. You have a power over the subconscious mind, something that even these....faggots possess. You can control them the same way that all women learn to control others, only you can do it **better** because you can **fuck their **_**minds.**_" Four-Eyes tapped the side of his head for emphasis, accidentally making a bruise in his skin after too many powerful taps. It healed almost instantly, but he still had to wince and blink at it.

"...how?" Yvonne asked.

"Just make eye contact" Four-Eyes explained "with one of them. Just look into that darkness in their helmets until you can feel something click. Then focus on that click, prolong it, lengthen it exponentially until they're so crippled with lust that they can't even run! I'll take care of the rest." Four-Eyes clapped his hands and turned back to the field, taking a running start to the center of the offensive line, the only man defending against them. Yvonne was confused and swam in a sea of doubt. She had no real understanding yet of what her demon guardian meant, yet had the anxious pain that she would find out very soon....


	85. Realm of All Fantastic Horror

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Sam ran his broken body as fast as he could, pumping his arms heavily to try and lift his legs up in proper time with each other. There was darkness all around him, which he knew could materialize at any second and reach forward to skewer him from all sorts of impossible angles and turn his body into a spray of bloody chunklets. His own eyes burned, and all he could see past himself, and the cosmos, was a burning fire of a galaxy. There was nothing but heat and pointless flashing lights, all of which he seemed to see as a grand, galactic flame. He knew that his mind was going, but he couldn't for the life of him figure out where as it was too dark to even see the floor anymore.

He looked back in a start to see if any more darkness, or its owner, was still chasing after him. He saw nothing but an empty hallway, which scared him even more. As he ran his feet fell quieter and quieter as the floor started to become silently covered in a layer of shadowy ashes. His leather shoes were already stained with the soot but he kept going regardless. Everything around him seemed to be falling in a snowy fall of ash and blackness. Everything shook and quaked violently with mad upheavals of energy unseen from the current realm of Purgatory that Sam sprinted through.

_What was that?_ He thought, hearing the walls crack and tumble. _It sounds like rats in the walls, but huge rats. No, more like a moose, or many of them.....mooses?_ Indeed, a stampede was charging through the walls. Dark monsters and demonic fiends sped all to one point without bothering to come out from the wall itself. In their two-dimensional plane the beasts crowded each other, all galloping or slithering or otherwise converging to a far-distant single point. _Where are they going? What is happening?_

"You've really done it now, man" Damien said. Sam stopped in an instant, leaving a trail behind each foot as he slid to a stop over the thick ashes on the floor. Damien was there in front of him again, standing in a slump with his shoulders rolled forward and arms draped down. His face was hidden in shadows, save for his eyes which continued to strobe with mad circles of color. "You released _it_."

"Shit" Sam said, breathless. "What is..._it?_"

"**The Negative**" Damien said. "Sealed away in a past I forgot about, an incidental incident that threatens to negate all of Purgatory in an instant if it wishes. A cosmic horror born out of humanity. Yes, the **Human Negative.** I broke it apart when it came here, using the powers already here, and I kept it sealed in the programming code that the demons were made of. When you screwed that up, it was unleashed, and now **all the congregated emotions and thoughts of all of humanity will converge, reform and drag this realm down into itself!**"

"Sounds like you're pretty far fucked then" Sam said. "But I'm not dead yet. I can still escape!"

"Oh can you?" Damien said, showing his face again as all the shadows burst away into wisps of steam. Now it was they, standing opposite each other in an endless hallway, with great black-scribbled fiends sprinting beside them as shadows inside the walls. "Life is far too fragile to bet with so flippantly. If you chose to escape then you're very much in the better mindset than your colleagues, who are all still here somewhere or other, fighting the insanity off while still managing to kill as many of my legion as they can. In the end, though, when the whole world is taken into an impossible, deep void, there's no real way to escape. In the end, we're all hopeless. Nobody can stand high when all the world is a sphere of corpses!" Damien's smile stretched from ear to ear with hideous, triangular steel-shaded teeth lining his mouth.

"You're an annoying man" Sam said. He pushed his hair back, out of his eyesight, and kept it slicked by the heavy sweat of his brow. "I'm going to kill you, and god damnit, I'm going to be happy about it!"

"Hmmm" Damien hummed. His eyes became static again, black surrounding an oceanic green circling infinite pits of darkness. "We'll see what happiness you can achieve when all the world is **DEAD!!!"** Damien opened his mouth wide, and from it came a mass of tentacles, reaching arms of darkness lacking hands with lethal-sharp tips. A dreadful appearance of merciless power, translucent and menacing things that shot out like pistons, all straight at Sam, and then winded and curled around him. He was trapped from all sides in a field of ethereal dread, manifested power formed from the darkness within Damien's own body.

Sam would not be daunted so easily. Instead of panicking he opened his eyes wide and opened a hole in space. The tentacles parted long enough for him to stagger away and then closed up just as he escaped. Damien was nowhere to be found, and judging by Sam's own fast-racing heart, he doubted that the princely demon was yet dead. The darkness continued to creep along the walls, and then from that darkness claws of monsters came. Sam fell on his own injured foot and narrowly avoided the swiping of a bladed leg, like a scythe fashioned out of some sickly-patched flesh to a long bone. The creatures were now flooding the routes of the walls so much that they all couldn't stay in at the same time, and some were slowly being pushed out. A massive wall of fat with snapping mouths and licking tongues positioned between each maw cut Sam's path off, forcing him to turn around. There hovered Damien, with arms outstretched, and in from the side came a sweeping tentacle that smashed Sam into the wall. Another came up under him, wrapped around his waist and threw him into the other wall.

"Can there truly be happiness in this world!?" Damien asked. "Of course not! **See what humanity has made out of misery? This is its true power: The Human Negative! The ultimate, all consuming entity! DESPAIR AND SUFFERING PERSONIFIED!!!!**" Sam coughed up blood, his body finally admitting to its inherent weakness. He glared up at Damien and let loose his power again, obliterating a hole that led straight upward and to the clouds that likewise parted with an enormous hole to a field of blackness and stars. Damien's head was gone, but his body seemed unaffected.

"You're starting to get really redundant....." Sam growled. He was too weak to move, but refused to stop fighting. He glared at the tentacle, which promptly vanished, and then was dropped to the floor. A demon's claw, long and mangled like a brutish dog's disfigured leg and clubbed-footed paw, smashed down just beside Sam's head and crushed a crater into the floor. Sam rolled away as the paw continued to rise and stomp back down, searching blindly for something to crush underfoot as it tried to power itself forward in the darkness of the wall.

_I don't care about gods or cosmic entities_ Sam thought. _All of this is just bullshit to me. The only thing I need to do is pick up a weapon and kill with it. That's all I need to do, that's all a war is to a soldier._ Sam looked up and started crawling desperately past Damien's still-headless floating body. He stared at it, straining his body to remain upright a little longer, ignoring the blood coming from his throat and out his mouth. He ignored the pain and the whole terrible ordeal of his circumstances, he ignored the cries and mad shrieks of the dead and the dying. He just looked up and winced once, and it was gone. The body and the tentacles extending from it were completely gone. Sam pushed forward, crawling with his two arms pulling his whole body along the ash-covered floor, until he could move no more and rolled over. He chose to rest on his back and leave Death to itself. Whether it came to him or not was its own decision.

The legs and arms of indescribable horrors within the walls continued to reach out blindly. The beasts kept pushing each other in their mad dash and stalled the great pilgrimage into a whole being with their bodies all clogging the routes to the unseen nexus. Thick-bladed claws and spidery spear-points attached to mechanical unfolding ligaments and rolling metal ball-joints kept stabbing and clawing and skittering around on the floor, carving scratches into the surface under the ashes. The beasts kept ripping around to get some footing, all madly scratching and ripping and slashing apart, until the procession had finally been able to move forward, and left the hallway completely. No shadows remained. The dark ashes began to simply vanish from the floor. Soon, everything was clear and empty, and the scratching marks on the floor all formed a delicately and artistically etched framing of the single whole object still left.

Sam there lay in a martyr's pose, both arms out and legs together with his head to the side and dripping blood. The tiles surrounding him were carved with demonic incantations of unseen, unpronounceable runic marks framed within a myriad of curved marks that made a delicately-designed ritualistic framing for the sacred body. Sam was alive, but weary, and the floor was empty save but for his own tired life........Yet even in rest he was restless, for the words kept echoing to his mind under the veil of a subconscious chorus, uttering pure hatred and madness all the time.

**AZATHOTH AZATHOTH AZATHOTH**

**

* * *

**

The ball had to come down eventually. The cheerleaders took the field for half-time while the opposing team just sat together, three strong with only one player remaining, and watched as the inhuman tower was built up so far that they reached half-way to the highest height, the apex of the round rain tarp to retrieve the ball. Then the bottom-most cheerleader threw her comrades up, breaking her arms from the strain. The next one up did the same, and then the one above her and above her still, until the last girl was thrown up above the tarp and into the rain. The ball was there, holding onto the fabric like a spider in a windstorm. The cheerleader managed to knock it loose and back down into the hole it came from, but she herself lost her balance and fell straight down, aimed for the great black void where her shrieking body disappeared completely. With all that over and the pile of dead and dying bodies dissolving into the grass, the game went on.

One man took the field. One man, a demon with a terribly strong body, took the field opposing the home-team offense line. Their startlingly holy appearance neither fooled nor moved the demonic specter of pure berserk force. In the end, he was determined to kill them all, whether through their own devices or his....

_Just keep the plan in mind, Yvonne_ Four-Eyes thought, hoping in his silence that she would remember. _Just look them in the eyes! No one with an intact mind could resist your power! No man or woman alive is safe from your innermost powers! Focus on them! Bring them out! Bring to life the terror within you and force-feed it to these fag-hats with me!!!_ The play was set up. Four-Eyes had forgone any actual extra-point conversion and had the ball set up at their five-yard line. His plan was simple, but dangerous and complex. In a second the ball was hiked and Four-Eyes crashed into the center lineman. The QB cocked his arm back, shrunk back a few steps, then started running on his own with the ball.

"COCK!" Four-Eyes shouted. He moved his hands up to the neck of the man he blocked and gripped so strong that a wicked snap followed, and the defender's neck was promptly broken. The offense had gained just less than 10 yards with that single, momentary push. The demon through the blocker to the ground in anger and moved back. "You'll pass eventually, you fuck-ups" he said as he moved into position. It was him, all alone, fighting a veritable army. From Yvonne's standpoint, he was basically done for. He had nothing left to fight for but to keep his word on staying alive, a word he seemed to honor well enough to act upon any time.

"This is all so stupid!" Yvonne lowed. "Why does he have to fight!? What's the point of all this!?" Still, she knew she could do nothing to stop him or make him realize the idiocy of his actions. All she could do was help him, and she wasn't even certain on how to do _that_.

_Just do what he said_ Yvonne thought. _He's going to get one of them to run this way, and I have to look into his eyes through his helmet. Then something will click...what will click? Honestly, I don't have a fucking clue what this insane bastard is getting at anymore! I'm supposed to fuck their minds!? What does that even mean??_ Yvonne's mind very quickly trailed off into a graphic depiction of a literal 'mind-fuck' and what she would do to make it real. It thoroughly disgusted her, but left her with an intrigued sense of curiosity. _What would a brain feel like up there.....?_

The ball was hiked. Yvonne nearly missed it. Four-Eyes ran after a sprinting running-back, who was easily faster than he, who in turn was running to catch a ball. He looked back as it traveled, slowing down just enough to get in the ball's path, and managed to catch it and turn just as Four-Eyes closed in, leaving the whole rest of his team trailing behind. The running-back was alone against the demon and started edging toward the sideline. His eyes were fixed straight forward. His body moved in perfect machinations to go straight ahead. His feet were just within the boundaries that he had no purpose to cross either intentionally or otherwise. Yvonne looked into the eyeshield of the demon-runner's helmet from afar. As he got closer, his vision started to widen, and then he saw her.

She stood as some mysterious imp, a succubus unholy but inviting, a tiny spec of paradise in infinite hell. She was something that couldn't be resisted. All of her body, especially her eyes, welcomed him to her. She had the glimmering spark of a seductive intention, and a welcoming one at that, in her eyes. The player's motions seemed to slow more and more, until he was no longer moving. Nothing was moving but that graceful goddess, a chaste slut, a virgin whore. She took from a sling behind her a bat and swung it out. Now she wore decorative armor of the most enticing quality and had dirty-blond hair extending down to her shins. All leather and taut. A corset and leotard with thigh-high leather boots that had spikes for heels. Bridal gauntlets barbed with spikes around each wrist and of course, the ultimate piece of fetish for any man whose life is a sport, a leather football helmet, really old-school, with black polish under each of her already shaded eyes.

She licked her luscious, lustrous lips of red-hot-red and sighed. She swung the bat and moaned. Then she slapped herself on the hip and looked out of the corner of her eye. The player's whole world stood still. Even the rain failed to fall and the grass made no movement or ghastly shrieking. There was nothing but silence and her, and even she broke the sacred silence with the creaking of tight leather against her already tight body. Each move she made was erotic somehow and aroused the player more and more. Then she turned to the side, facing away from the man, and winked at him. She took her bat in both hands and brought it up to her mouth. She started licking the tip, slathering it up and bringing it near enough to her lips so that they touched without surrounding. Then, with a loud moan she stuck it in, and her sucking intensified. The player's muscles all relaxed in the frozen flow of time and the ball already started to drop from his arms.

Then, keeping her side to the man, Yvonne took the bat up, balanced it in her mouth, **and slowly started working it down her throat.** So aroused by the eroticism, the player's body went totally limp, save for one area of pronounced manhood under some thick protective paddings. When the bat was completely vanished, the impish succubus turned full his way and winked with a wide open mouth to show that it really was gone.

Four-Eyes piled into the man, grabbed the ball as it fell from his limp arm and held him up above the ground by his thick hand around his taut and muscular waist. Then he clutched hard and heard a _**SNAP**_. Once again, Four-Eyes' berserk strength had saved him. Now he had both the ball and a player immobilized in his hand. The home team started slowing their run to a stop when they saw the demon, all four eyes of his shining a murderous shade of red light, and the broken teammate in his hand. They had thought it was over, but the clock kept going. When they turned to notice this, they had to turn back and see the evil beast towering over them in sheer stature and pure evil as he walked toward them.

"**You think we're done yet?"** he said. **"Listen to him. He's still breathing!"** Four-Eyes held up his victim to the team and the could, indeed hear very labored but excited breathing coming from him. His own lust was keeping him alive! **"Now there's nothing left to do but beat you all within an inch of death and _RUN DOWN THE CLOCK!!!!!_"** Seeing no recourse, the men of the team moved to attack. Even with both hands occupied, however, Four-Eyes was more powerful than they could collectively handle. He began his rampage through them, using their own debilitated teammate as a flail when he pleased, and ran the ball across what was left of the field to run. Once he reached the beginning of the end-zone, with the rest of the team hot on his trail, he tossed their defective member across the gap and safely just out of bounds. Then, placing the ball gently in the grass as a technical prolonged fumble, Four-Eyes took up a vicious fighting stance as his enemies, the living-unliving ire of all his unnatural existence, pounced to attack!!!

* * *

At the tree, Tom stood aghast. He had frozen up in such sheer horror that neither his mind nor his body could move. There stood an entity that struck him with such awe and fear that he could no longer act even with the subconscious mind that drove him. All his hate and anger and murderous want gave way to a supreme, preternatural fear. The King in Yellow, Hastur stood before him! And Jormungandr, the hateful spirit of unity that Tom's soul shared as an incomplete part, slithered along the ground with his serpentine body and got up close to Tom's body. Human and snake met with a reflection of features, one struck in absolute horror and the other in patronizing admiration.

Then, the latter was decapitated in a flash, and died with its mouth slowly opening in a gentle gaping of terror before it hit the dust of the ground. The body stayed upright, the arms down and legs coiled around its base to keep the torso up, spurting blood while the human boy simply started laughing. The being in gold, the Yellow King, observed silently and unmoving as Tom just broke down into a homicidal rage.

"_**BRING IT ON!!!!"**_ Tom raged to the boughs of the tree. He couldn't see, but he still knew. Snakes lived in this tree, a whole lot of snakes that looked something like men, who once _were_ men, but in the end were the same man repeated. Just imposters with skin to shed and venom in their mouths. _**"I'LL END IT ALL RIGHT HERE, YOU FAGGOT-FUUUUCKS!!!!"**_ Tom swung the blood off his sword at Hastur, but the droplets were blocked. The snakemen descended from the tree quickly, their legs and lower torsos trailing back while their upper bodies, all identically strong and in imitation of the fallen Jormungandr's, stayed in human form. To become more threatening to their still-living self, the snakemen extended their necks and hissed and snarled at Tom from a distance with blood-red eyes.

Tom leaned forward and stabbed his sword between the eyes of one of the snakemen, who quickly started writhing in pain, his head and neck whipping around as blood started to leak out, and then in a flash Tom's movement cut the beast's head straight off. Tom's face had no monstrous deformity in his rage. In fact, he looked rather dashing and charismatic when he posed after the first kill, holding his sword out as if to offer its blade to whichever willing neck would take to it. Another came in and attacked, grabbing the blade of the sword in an absolute grip. Then it snapped its neck forward and made a bite with a wide, distended jaw opening chomp. Tom ducked down and drew his sword out of the grip, slicing the creature's fingers. Then he sliced upward, cutting all along the thing's long throat and spilling a gross and thick gathering of blood to the ground.

Tom rolled to the side and picked himself up with gun in hand. He fired a quick spray of bullets, none of them hitting their marks. Then he threw a grenade, unarmed, into the gray and waited for a snakeman to pick it up. When he did, Tom took exact aim and shot the grenade itself, blowing the side off the beast and startling the others. He switched his gun for his sword, rushed in and stabbed into the huge gaping hole in the snakeman's side, going right through its heart, then powering the sword in a slash out its back. He immediately moved forward and started swinging at another snakeman, advancing in wide steps with each swing as the beast dodged away in quick jerks and wriggles. Then it latched the end of its tail, its elongated toes, into the ground at the side and pulled itself away quickly just as Tom made a wide slice for its mid-section. Without injury, the snakeman hissed out laughter at Tom, who only paused with his sword held at the end of its swing. He glared out under his extended arms, took a hand from his hilt, aimed it closed at the snakeman and opened it with a vocal of "Shwing!" A cut formed, shallow but bleeding, on the snakeman's abdomen, and then its intestines spilled out. The snakeman grabbed them in a panic, looked at them, coughed blood, fell over and slowly died.

"**HHHHKKKK!!!!!**" the snakemen remaining hissed.

"**FFFFFFFUCK YOUUUUUU!!!!**" Tom shouted, his own menacing hiss back. All the snakemen gathered tight together and coiled their bodies together in a disgusting mass that writhed around and around confusingly. A ball of snakes, of snakemen whose bodies had lengthened and narrowed to the shape of just giant snakes. Their mouths had opened so wide that they jaws ended somewhere half-way down their necks, and thus the only way to keep them open was too look straight ahead while their noses slimmed to slits and their eyes sank back along their warping skulls. Now there was a hydra, a disgusting dragon of tangled mass with many snake-like heads that roared with hissing, each with a tuft of wavy green hair atop it.

"You think I'm an idiot?" Tom said. "Playing video games is a great way to learn about myths that they're based on. Heracles, for instance, had to burn the headless stubs of each Hydra head that he cut off so new ones wouldn't grow in their place! If you think you can pull a fast one on me just by pulling from one of the most common-fucking monsters in all of history, then man, **I must be replicated from a fucking RETARDED-ASS GUY!!!**" Tom struck a pose, both hands to his hilt, his left leg fully extended forward with his right leg bent and crouched back, as if to get a pushing start on a quick sprint. His sword was held at level with his head, which he ducked down to glare through his lashes. His mouth sank into his muffler and he took on a vicious likeliness to his own loathing, to the dreaded assassin that he had failed to murder not too long ago.

In his rage, Tom hadn't noticed his own change, that he had revived himself as the truest incarnation of a dreadful man. He had become, again, the Norse Warhead, the super-hero of the secret battlefront, the Nazi's ultimate supernatural bane, **Jormungandr!!!** Tom jumped forward into the tangle mass, ready to swing at the first thing that tried to attack him blindly.

Then he drifted past a cloud of blood and guts and bone. Terrified faces replaced the heads of draconic snakes, and those faces soon exploded in silent but graphic mists of blood and chunky brain matter. Tom looked everywhere as his foe self-destructed, then landed in a roll and skid himself up to a stand, only to trip over the long and dead body of Jormungandr still freshly lying some length of distance away. The blood cloud, none of which somehow touched Tom's body, started to climb up strangely. To Tom, a mortal with such limitations of mortality on his perception of such an event, it was as if watching blood run down a glass window, but upside down, and in short jerking movements. Soon it was all away, and all the bodies seemed to simply vanish into the terribly distant sky.

Then Tom turned with a start and saw a kingly figure, a true King in Yellow with pristine state of garbing and a glorious tower of solid gold for a crown. Over a sheer and flat metal surface replacing a head, the entity wore a veil marked in darker golden ink with some runic pattern that seemed to symbolize a balance as well as a chaotic origin. Tom saw Hastur in his fullest glory with a hand extended skyward, as if following the ascension of dead blood, but he realized that the blood was actually following his hand.

"You again?" Tom said. He swung his sword and turned around as he stood up, preparing to fight the unfightable. "You stole my kill, asshole! What the fuck's your problem!?" As Tom stormed forward, Hastur floated back down the the ground. There he stood a good ten feet in human dimensions, though to Tom they seemed to be on more or less equal ground. Such is the warrior's high of battle.

"You fight for yourself well" Hastur said, willing his voice to be heard by Tom in whatever form it took, this one being deep and resonating, truly a god-like voice. "But I ask you, what do you know of terror? Why have these things inspired you with such fear? Is it for the reason that by facing them, you must face the frailty of your own life? Knowing how many of you there were, you realize that there's nothing particularly special or unique about your physical life being real?"

"Man, fuck that!" Tom exclaimed. "I'm sick of being sick about that! I'm done being weak! That trauma has nothing to do with it at all! **If I were like that then respawning in a video-game would create the same moral and psychological errors for me to process, wouldn't it!?**"

"I would argue against that" Hastur said. "Still, you don't need to listen to me. I'm just a voice in silence, a figure that occupies space which cannot be seen. In plain terms, to you and your species, **I am fear. I came not too long ago, and brought with me the much-reviled emotion that you know and practice as 'terror'.**"

"You're a dick" Tom said, quite bluntly. "You know how much humanity has suffered with fear dictating their lives!? There've been genocides, entire groups and races of people, being killed to total death because of another group's inherent fears of the unknown!"

"Ah yes" Hastur said, crossing his arms, which hit like their were thickly armored under his billowing golden robe sleeves. "The natural fear of the unknown is the only fear I never contested myself to create. All others: fear of fire, of water, of the sun, of the sky, of other men, of women, of all animals, of genitalia, of squirrels, gnomes, disorder, little Asian girls, darkness, spontaneous combustion, pigs, ham, bacon, sand, people who live near or in sand, spiders, skirts, wind, space, death; these all held, to me, contradictions that I had to debate before instilling as time went on."

".........who's afraid of squirrels?" Tom asked.

"To fear the unknown" Hastur continued "is to respect that which humanity cannot comprehend, or manipulate. When I met it, humanity was a gathering of such creatures that were not afraid to explore the world and discover new things within it. Men went into the unknown and returned with implements of war, and the heads of wild game, and success and general prosperity. To fear the unknown was to fear the world and to contradict the very human nature to conquer and expand. But I saw flaw in this. If left to expand eternally, would humanity not lose itself to such expenditure of natural resources? Would the gene-pool be not so thinly stretched that humanity would lose any war that it could not understand the ways of fighting? I thought of all the beings in the cosmos, all the greater entities that had long since become ancient and Elder in the time before humanity's rise, and I knew that left unchecked, those terrible things would come to humanity, **and then it all would end. Humanity, the Universe..._everything._**"

"So?" Tom said. "That's what humans do. We form nations and strive to be the _only_ nation. It's just war. It's out nature."

"......not quite" Hastur said. "That is certainly the nature of evolution, but when a species had evolved to the point that their belief in an entity causes such an entity to exist, is that not the pinnacle of all evolution? Why continue to expand? Why must evolution continue? You see the results every day. Birth defects are the cause of the natural will of the universe to progress humanity further and further, knowing full well that it has **no paths left to take...**"

"So......" Tom began, utterly wordless for the moment. "What does this mean to me? Why am I here, why is this all here....Why are you in charge of taking in cloned people or duplicates or whatever when you have such obvious...alternate agendas?"

"You finally catch on" Hastur said. "I didn't know if I was boring you or not, and I'd like not to press my luck in that matter. Thomas Quindale, this is not a permanent position of mine. I wandered into this hell just before you came to be, and after the man who you were made from was dead for some time. I have been waiting for the signs of all the cosmos for a chance to correct the mistakes I have made, to perfect what I have introduced to humanity. Therefore, Thomas, I have predicted your path and routed you here to Purgatory. I took myself within that gaping black void you saw and exist out of it for now. I did all of this, and gathered up your lesser parts around their greater whole, **to ask you an endless favor. I need your body, Thomas. I need to live to fix what is wrong, and only a body such as yours will suffice this need.**" Tom was stricken silent. There stood the King in Yellow, All Fear Itself, asking for a mortal shell.

And behind that shimmering being was the tree, with leaves of gold and fruits all fallen, standing on a rise of ground now surrounded by a pool of blood where half-formed abominations were drowning in silence. And amidst all this confusion stood Tom, who realized too late that he had gone **abso-fucking-lutely insane from the shit-storm all around him. **All his mouth could do, aside from ignore his mind's cries to voice an answer, was twitch at the corners.....


	86. The Emergence Begins

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

Despite all the effort in the world that would have easily ended many others, Damien struggled through his fated death. He managed to survive, sacrificing his face only to save it, and now clawed his way across the floors of the very deepest realm of Purgatory, the forbidden and fateful Boiler Room. He crawled and pushed himself along, his face lacking its skin, with worm-like tentacles of darkness squirming out from between the sinuous lines of his muscles. His eyes were remarkable round and wide without eyelids to squint and glare them into finer points.

"Almost there" he spoke, so full of confidence that even his skinless expression did not halter the charisma in his voice. "I can still keep this place afloat....for a lack of any better term. Hehehe. That bastard really does have me out powered, but in all likelihood, he's already dead, and it's all his fault...." Damien, with his legs broken and pressed thin like fully-squeezed rolls of toothpaste, crawled his way frantically across a searing-hot floor. Each time his palm pressed down onto the fire-heated metal floor some skin was left on it and a long trail of flesh pulled from his body and seared black was behind him.

He didn't let the imaginary pain stall him. He crawled with even more intensity as he neared the final vault. He reached up, too short from the floor he was roasted fast to, and summoned Nyarlathotep to help him. His middle finger-nail burst off with a speckling splash of blood following and a black tentacle shadow reached out to open the immense door. The weight of it didn't matter to the darkness that was Nyarlathotep, and the door was promptly opened and swung open by the thin appendage.

"Thank you" Damien said. "Now, please, help me across the floor. I'm tired of crawling, the joke is too long worn now." Nyarlathotep extended some tentacles out from Damien's shadowy aura and propped him up on thick, tentacle legs. The darkness moved him forward. Even away from the floor, all the heat started to blister and boil Damien's skin until it was all steamed away and only his demonic skeletal frame remained. He caught fire and took on a wholly demonic form, his _true_ form as the devil's son, a heretic beast of all fire and bone. Only his skeleton seemed human in form, but the bony wings protruding from the joints located next to his shoulder joints and the extended tailbone curving into a long and arrow-tipped tail added to his incredible evil appearance. His skull face was covered with flames that flickered and raged into the form of his regular charismatic outline, all red and orange with white-hot eyes and teeth.

"This is it" Damien said in a voice of all fire and evil and blasting menace, a voice mere humans, like I, cannot simply describe. "This is my rite. My flag. This is the sign of my realm. **My beating heart, sealed in a case, tied to the veins of this reality, **_**the World Tree of Godless Purgatory.**_** All the veins and arteries the branches. The blood giving form to all the demons under my will and whim. Its roots all lead back to me, all still tied within me...**" Damien took a hand to his sternum and opened his ribcage like a fucking door where a hollow spot was without any fire or form. The arteries that led to that spot, all made of spiraling tubes of fire, stopped just short of what was once there, the demon's own mortal heart, which was now outside of his body and sealed in the center of the Boiler Room. It sat within a clear glass case that was inside of an enormous glass globe. Attached to the heart were a myriad of wires and pumping tubes to keep it moving. Those wires led out of the case and into all corners of the sphere that protected the beating life of the realm. It looked like a huge eyeball-inside.

"So long as my heart remains alive" Damien said, closing up his chest, "all shall be well. I will make a final stand here against the revolting madness and stop it before it can fell my endless realm of phantasm and glory! **None shall wreck my kingdom! Not Heaven or Hell! This godless place ****of mine is mine and mine alone!!!!**" Damien reached his fists up to the ceiling and spotted in the solid metal sheet a leak of some kind. A dark spot, like a water stain with the tint of deep brown, was setting and slowly expanding just over his head. A drip of the moisture fell and hit Damien's own fiery hand. He took a look at where it hit and saw his own skin, which turned black and crisp in an instant, then flaked away into dust, then was grown over with fire again. Damien glanced up and jumped back as a quick rain of strange liquid fell down to douse him.

"My my my" Damien said with a snort of amusement. "Already a challenger, and the challenge has barely opened! You must be eager to get killed!" Damien's head changed. From his skull two holes formed, one above each eye. From those skulls the black tentacles of Nyarlathotep reached out and curved up into horns. More tentacles extended from the darkness and shadows located all around and within the ultimate demon prince, and soon his form was altered. Thin veins of black surrounded by pure fire, all encased within the membrane of a shadow that formed to fit the demon's body. His wings were pure fire tipped with claws of steel-rending darkness and his mouth was filled with solid fangs of unmelting black diamond. His white skeleton became black, fire coursed through his body, his eyes widened into circles with black viper-like slits running from top to bottom. Damien stomped his claw-toed foot forward and dented the floor. With fists tensed and body shaking, the demon-beast-prince roared a terrifying battle-cry to the gathering dark madness.

_**HRRRRAAAAAAGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!**_

The wetness didn't mind it. It formed itself up after gathering and pouring down into a semi-solid, slime-like entity. It sloshed and wiggled about like a puddle of chaotic jelly and didn't give itself any form at all. Then it formed tiny bird-like skeleton wings out of broken metal from the floor itself and a head. Its head was horrible, stout and snout like an alligator's. No eyes or curvature of a head, just the mouth that was lined with grizzly fangs and dripped with an unholy liquid of pure evil. This thing was no taller than the demon prince, but much thicker and infinitely more strange.

"You can't intimidate me" Damien lowed in his charisma-furnace voice "with your jiggly body! I'll tear through you and end your existence! **How hard can it be to kill something above God!? _GOD IS NOTHING TO ME!!!!_**" Damien charged forward and cut his claws through the thing's jelly-like body. His otherworldly heat and shadowy cover carved five thick slashes into the thing's body that quickly spilled over as its jiggly form reconstituted itself. Then a tentacle, a strange amoeba-like protrusion, shot out and hammered Damien square in his chest. He was thrown back against the vault door from the great force. The damage was so much that his fire-body flickered for a moment under the darkness. His claws had broken off during his attack and exposed his hand which shook out of sheer pain as his skin roasted and coated over in fire and darkness again.

_Whatever this is_ Damien thought _I will end it. I am the God-Beast of All Existence. I possess the power of Absolute Darkness. I am the wandering King of the Demons, the King of the All Kingdom. This infinite realm is mine, always mine, only mine and shall forever exist for me and for all miserable humanity to wander through!_

"Come!" Damien announced to the disgusting thing. He crossed his arms across his chest in a macabre gesture and let his skullion face shine out with the roaring red fire beneath his shadowy skin. His clawed fingers regrew and curled up in a tense rage. His legs went together tightly and he stood, his tail behind him tracing a figure-eight sideways in the air. **"I shall show you what power made this place mine!**" The thing, his enemy, the mad jiggly puddle it was, did not hold understanding for his talking. It simply opened its snapping mouth up wide and revealed the very organic lining of its jaws. Meaty and wet with a viscous saliva, lined with sharp and jagged teeth, leading down into an infinite spiraling darkness. Once glance would send a man mad....

I shan't describe it.

* * *

"HYADADADADADADADADADADA!!!!!!" Lammy shouted in excitement. The arms that wielded her pure force power within her afro were tossing pearly spheres of energy at the agile demon across the gym. A new and deadly game of dodgeball had been created. Lammy herself was enough of a team of throwers to win any given bout. Her enemy, however, was not only resiliant but fast as well. None of the balls hit it and simply smashed into the walls leaving dents and cracks and growing craters with each loud smack they made. "Come on, you pansy-ass freak!" Lammy shouted. "Show me what you've got!" The demon swayed to the side of one barrage and into another. It kicked its feet off the ground and backflipped through all the balls, still avoiding all possible contact, even with a long and trailing coat of flesh dragging around it. It caught one of the balls in its hand and crushed it flat. The air that hissed out exploded out before it and curved the other incoming balls away from him.

"So they're air pockets" Mort said.

"They're what?" JJ asked.

"Her power" Mort began "allows her to super-condense air into sphereoid shapes then throw them. They're kept intact with what seems to be a sort of skin that bursts on contact, and the air she intakes is enough to blow apart solid brick and concrete."

"That's right, boys" Lammy said. "This is the power of air you're seeing. Air, when condensed and concentrated, can do anything to anything. You know air, if fast enough, can cut through metal? And air and wind can pick up whole houses from their foundation and throw them miles away! Air is the source of all real power. Nothing can beat it!"

"Well, maybe" JJ said. "I mean, realistically, wouldn't sucking up all the air everywhere that fast make it harder and harder for us to breathe right now?"

"You think this hair is just for show?" Lammy said. The beast managed to advance during their conversation and lunged forward. Mort lunged against it, stabbing the spade of his shovel Agony straight into its throat and forcing it backwards. Lammy doubled up on his attack and hammered the fiend with three exploding spheres of hardened air and energy. The creature was blown against the floor with such force that it bounced up, spun rapidly through the air and was indented high up in the wall upon stopping. It seemed unharmed, still, but was stunned. "There's a pocket of air in my hair so huge that if it got cut this whole room would be obliterated! I have enough air to kill a million men with my power in one sitting!"

"And what happens when that air is expended?" Mort asked.

"You want to find out?" Lammy asked with very accusatory eyes. Mort and JJ shook their heads slowly. "Better not ask stupid questions unless yours stupid ass wants them answered!" Lammy started walking forward, toward the demon. Ten arms came from out of her hair, all of them pale and bony, each holding a volleyball of compact air and energy. The demon pushed itself from out of the wall and was hit by a ball before it landed. It was blown back into the wall and started to bleed in drops from its mouth. "You gonna give up yet, ugly!?" Lammy shouted as she pummeled the fiend with more and more attacks, unrelenting and merciless. "Huh!? I can't hear you over your dumb-ass choking on your own blood!"

"She's kinda scary" JJ said.

"It's always the women with the most fearsome attitudes" Mort said. "It's almost genius in its cliched nature."

"You think I could hit on her?" JJ asked, half-joking.

"If either of us tried" Mort said "she'd beat us half to death and throw the rest of our life into a hole somewhere...." The mood between the two men became hopeless, JJ for being shot down before even trying and Mort for thinking of entirely unrelated things. _To find such powerful yet helpful beings here, of all places...and on top of that, to be led here by a fiend capable of twisting and mal-aligning the winds of fate. This is troublesome. I feel that I have been displaced in the universe. It is as if I was, at one moment, gazing at a powerful and beaming start, then everything went terribly black, and I awoke in the center of an infinite field of space between distant, shining points! It's baffling! How could I be throw so rapidly from hither to thither without even knowing it!?_

As Lammy continued her assault on the demon by pounding it deeper and deeper into the wall with her volley of balls, a sinister presence entered the gym and captured the attention of all three fighters. They simply felt it, but could not fell where it was projected from. An all-surrounding dark and evil had displaced them, and suddenly the walls became flooded with the moving images of an army of pure darkness. The off-white bricks became black and flat as the colorless deluge of evil came in and collided together on the wall opposite where Mort and JJ stood. The wall behind them was untouched. All the demons were converging to the same point, to some malicious nexus of absolute evil and darkness, and the realm shook. The room, the walls, all that was connected to it and all the ground outside; **things just started breaking.** The grass and ground of limbo heaved and buckled, giving way to infinitely dark fissures that shot up taller than the mountains in the endless distance.

"What's happening!?" JJ asked. Lammy stopped her barrage for a moment and saw the demon get pulled by friendly hands of mangled flesh and inhuman form into the darkness of the wall. Then, it was dragged into a single point in the middle of the wall, a blackness even blacker than the ink-black walls that constantly swarmed and combined together. A darkness beyond vision, a tunneling sight that disoriented Lammy right into falling over into the arms of Mort. He wore his black goggles and saw the world without color, protecting himself from the malicious illusion.

"Don't look at it" Mort said as he picked her up and turned her around. Her balance was regained but a stark and deadly chill crept up her back, the tense presence of that darker-and-darker-still wall. "Something terrible is happening. We must leave at once!" Mort started running for the nearest busted-down exit with JJ and Lammy following behind.

"A-fuckin-men!" JJ said.

"Don't you curse when you're praying!" Lammy said, regaining her snippy attitude at once. "Didn't your mother ever teach you anything?"

"I don't remember that" JJ protested. Suddenly, the demons pushed each other from the wall again, and a mesh-net of bone and stringy, flowing flesh snapped down to block the path to the door.

"Well shit!" Mort exclaimed outright. "This is just getting worse and worse each passing second!"

"It's like a bad horror movie!" JJ screamed. "A bad horror movie where nothing makes sense!"

"Get a grip!" Lammy snapped, jabbing JJ in the leg. "Don't let the madness get a hold of you. If either of you start to turn, I'm killing you. No questions!"

"Fair enough" Mort said. He sheathed his shovel and equipped his menacing chainsaw. With a rev and a roar he started the beast growling and walked toward the meshed net of skin and hanging bone. "Let's get going!" Mort took a powerful swing into the appendage's side and carved a swath of blood and destruction through its form. However, for each bone that he carved through, two narrower and denser things came out and rooted themselves into the floor. A moist and slimy residue slid off of them and down to the floor. The parts Mort had cut away died and hardened into chalk-white walls, leaving them even more trapped then before.

"Smooth" Lammy said. Mort deactivated Gore and sheathed it on his back.

"Seems even the wind isn't moving through it" Mort said, observing the world through his incredible vision. The winds swirled and twisted against the fence but did not pass through it. They constantly spiraled like a hurricane with the room caught in its wide eye and only the lull of passing breezes sifting across the bloody ground. Mort looked at the walls and saw a great expanse of silhouette monsters moving through them, the darkened shapes and shadows of an army of horrid beasts that moved and moved into a single shining point, the absolute light-sucking darkness that to Mort appeared as a series of concentric circles.

Then, **the winds stopped.** Mort glanced up suddenly as some meteor sped toward him, scaring the winds away, and he instinctively drew his shovel to block. From the ceiling, unseen yet sensed, a great fiend of evil dropped. Mort embraced the impact on the flat of his shovel and threw his attacker off and toward the center of the room. The being landed on steely toes with long daggers with happy-faced hilts in his hands. Mort had to rise up his goggles to see, as he simply couldn't believe it.

"You!" Mort said in a hush of awe. "You...it's you again!" Nny stood, his face still bright in its sickly pale color despite the darkness of the whole room, in the middle of the crowding shadows and warped spirits still hanging in the air. He irked out a grin and widened his eyes upon seeing Mort with his two new companions, both sizing him up as an enemy and preparing themselves for combat.

"Oh, joy" Nny said. "Now I can be the **villain I should be!**"

"What was that, punk!" JJ shouted.

"Stay back" Mort sternly ordered. "This man is mine to fight. He is an abomination of the universe. Therefore, **I must learn what has made him exist as such! Letting his knowledge go to waste in insanity will do the universe and I no justice at all!!!**" Though JJ and Lammy couldn't follow Mort's existential logic, they stayed back. Mort walked forward with shovels equipped, one per hand to counter Nny, and then stopped a short distance away. A standoff of pure wills ensued as the winds of fate started to tunnel into the black hole of misery.

* * *

"How absolutely serendipitous" Nny said mockingly. "I didn't think you'd live this long after seeing you the last time. You're either a stubborn ass kind of guy or a real kind of killer. Either way, I don't think you'll manage to escape from _this_."

"What are you?" Mort asked. "How did you come to exist in such a way that the universe has no effect on you!?" His demanding tone only moved Nny to grin, knowing that he was already on nerve over him.

"There's no secret to my life" Nny said. "I just live it. I'm a broken young mind in an unbreakable body, perhaps even evil and madness incarnate....what are you, then? Just sheer individualism incarnate? That's too complicated of a device to write! You should consider the author more when you make decisions that have an impact on your character!"

"Enough mad talk!" Mort demanded. "Tell me, you are immune to the winds of fate. They gather around you with no intention of moving you, but rather to be moved. What power do you hold that warps reality so?"

"You know" Nny began "I once died when I was attached to the world." The winds suddenly stopped with a loud bang of a thud. Al the shadows were in that one wall, and it was so dark that the only light coming from near it was from Nny's skin which was plainly visible despite the entire lack of light anywhere at that moment. "When I died I saw the entire world get sucked away into a void of darkness, and then I had a dream. I met God, blew people's heads up in heaven and then went to Hell where I couldn't even find proper suffering. Hell was more Hellish then I had dared to think of it. There were no rivers of blood, towers of spikes or puddings of shit. Just stupid people forced into acting stupid **forever.**"

The darkness started to form in the wall and distracted Mort from keeping Nny under close and scrupulous monitoring. The man's eyes drifted into the darkness and his sight was promptly sucked away, driving into the illusionary tunnel as if he was falling forever down a spiraling path that led only to more and more darkness. As his vision continued to race through that endless darkness, Nny's voice became more pronounced and Mort heard him talking even inside his head.

"When I awoke I had no idea whether I had been dreaming the whole time or if I had really died. I was missing a lot of hair, for some reason, so it's not impossible that I fell asleep and had it shaved off by some prankster kid. Still, the dream seemed to stick with me. I began to long for a departure, to separate myself from the humanity that had eternally cursed itself into pure stupidity like I had seen, such intolerable acts of inane injustice that made me cringe to imagine myself participating in. I know that, had I been born without this strange fate, when I died and went to Hell I'd just die all the time. My stupid loop of idiocy would involve me killing myself on a daily basis for the most inane and mundane reasons. I don't know how I escaped that fate.....all I know is that I managed to run someplace far away. Someplace where nothing mattered. **I went over the stars and stood on the vault of all reality, and looking down I knew it was beautiful....**"

Mort was slapped back to reality by Lammy, who came up from behind and grabbed him by the mouth.

"Dumb-ass!" she shouted. "Move!!!" Mort looked up and saw a thick shadow on the wall, a shadow that seemed not flat and made of light but one that was solid and dangerous. He and Lammy ran away just as it crashed down to flatten them, ignoring Nny who stood just under its arc as it went back into the gateway of darkness behind him. He stared forward for a moment then broke into a totally mad grin that sank into a sigh of relief.

"Holy shit!" Nny exclaimed. "That was close!" He turned quickly to the other three, then doubled back between the dark spot on the wall and them. "You see that!?"

_Everything into nothing_

An echoing voice was invading their minds. Some maleficent force was probing at them, all of them, and talking in a booming and godlike tone to them. Nny turned with an evil grin towards the darkness, the light of his face draining into the flashing white glares of his snarled teeth and angular eyes.

_**Nihil est Eternum**_

"What?" Mort said. "Latin. Why Latin?"

"It's just that kind of monster" Nny said. He sheathed his daggers in plain sight of Mort and reached into his inner trench-coat pocket to pull out some infinitely more nefarious tool. As his hand crept out from the pocket a few small plastic implements left his pocket by accident and hit the floor with a clatter. Mort could tell, somehow, that this man was not taking out actual weapons. Nny was in fact retrieving from within his hidden sleeve paintbrushes, all new and ready to use. **"It's exactly the kind of monster I wanted it to be!"**

From the entrance of the room, the one not blockaded by spikes and spires of bone and skin, came a swift skittering of bladed spindle legs. A new beast that outraced a huge pursuing globule entity of madness and writhing tentacles came into the room. The one retreating was like a cockroach in its form but utterly gigantic and without the proper head. It was headless with a spout of a neck protruding out. It ran into the darkness one side and out the other, pulling Nny's attention with it. He stalled for a moment, with paintbrush held in position before his face like a dramatically posed dagger, and watched the beast charge at the others. Mort armed himself for defense, as did JJ and Lammy, all ready for the encounter. Something shot out of the decapitated tube. Something vile and wrong.

With a flash of black Nny flew into scene and stabbed the slightly-sharp end of his plastic paintbrush into the side of the monster's newest protrusion. There, static and stunned, was **Happy Noodle Boy **again with a sharp implement stabbed into his 3-D head. It just stood static and blinked with its cockroach body stuck in mid-leg shuffle while the horrid beast that had chased it piled all into the void.

**YEEEEEEEOOOOOOOWWWWW!!!!!** shouted the thing. Johnny, in his rage, took out another paintbrush and stabbed into his loathesome creation's head again, this time with the brush end first, then jostled the thing's head and threw it down to the ground with a crack and a splatter.

"What is that thing?" Mort asked. Nny growled out in exasperation.

"Unfortunately" Nny said "I made that. Somehow, it made money, and I needed money. Any more questions?"

"I feel sorry for you" Mort said. Nny turned his head around and nodded.

"**Oh, you assmunch!"** shouted Happy Noodle Boy as he swung his arms in protest and anger. **"My doodle! You've punctured my doodle! I'll never be in a fancy band now! SUCK ON MY WRIST, SISTER!!!"**

"What the fuck?" Lammy said. She started shaking her head in disbelief. "I don't think...that's a demon."

"It" Nny began "is a part of a whole, and an ugly part at that."

"**You think you're so cool and superior" **HNB continued **"with your high-fi stereos and your flip-channel TVs!? I've been living life since before you were babies! MAN I LOOOOVE CUPCAKES!!!"**

"**Quiet time"** Nny lowed. He stomped on its face and shut it up. HNB's newest added dimension made him a prime target for injury, a fact that Nny aimed to exploit for his own twisted amusement. "There's nothing about you that's good. You, and your existence, are wrong things that I must correct!"

"**Tell that to him!"** HNB said. He pointed his stick-arm and blocky hand over to the wall. Now, rather than a gathered mass of shadows, only one remained. All the darkness converged into a single point that drained light, sound and reality around it, causing the space around the dark hole to collapse without actually breaking the form of the wall. It was like looking through some sort of concave lens or instrument that focused on one point while distorting the rest to stretch around it.

Images flashed before Nny's eyes. Images of unholy gore and murder, torn bodies and burnt faces, eviscerated corpses strewn out in a bathtub and brains yanked from skulls. A field of blood, gore, murder and death was all before him, a mad image that bled through his mind and into reality, causing a shrieking pain in his skull as his own thoughts began to literally manifest out of nothing. Mort, JJ and Lammy watched as a twisted and mangled procession of broken and torn human bodies was marched into the dark hole, carried by unseen puppet strings far above.

"**Are you scared now?"** HNB said. Mort glanced down in terror and saw that the stupid-faced creature had become evil. Its grin was that of a jack-o-lantern and its eyes were black outlined with white layered on the outside by black. Its imaginary brow had furrowed down and made sinister angles of its eyes. It looked like an evil decoration, yet it lived. Nny fell down to his knees with mouth wide open and eyes blank of life. He held his hands to his head as a silent scream went out from him, a call to the darkness which was absorbed by it. All the fake things in his brain became real. His mind endured the strain of God as a countless number of unfortunate victims walked through the darkness and into the portal in the wall.

"**This is darkness"** HNB said. **"This is the Human Negative made real by the magic of this realm!"** HNB's body detached from its carrier body and hovered up, dripping blood from the straw-thin ling that was its waist, still smiling viciously. **"Behold, heroes, the fall of all reality! Yet again, the dissolve of all existence lies with this man, this broken boy, who could never grow past the instinct to kill to resolve his conflicts."**

"You godless monster!" Mort shouted, his voice loud and clear in the silent room. All the wind echoed with a noise of sorrow, a haunting silence and distant breeze. "What goal do you seek to accomplish? What grand scheme do you seek to deconstruct!? What aim to you have in taking away the very winds of fate from this plain of reality!?"

"Mort" JJ said, laying a careful hand on his friend's shoulder, "I don't think we should be asking this thing any questions."

"Hm?" Mort grunted.

"He's right" Lammy said. "I don't think....this thing will listen to us." HNB hovered for a moment in silence, then lowered his head. The single strand of hair atop his skull drifted down and started to wiggle with its own diluted sense of life.

"**So you seek to defy me, mortal!?"** HNB proclaimed. Mort saw all points start to converge behind the thing. **"You shall see what a **_**true**_** God's form takes! The God of the People! Behold, **_**ENDLESS SUFFERING!!!!!!**_**"** HNB shrank back in an instant. With a whining pitch space around them seemed to burst. From far away and outside, the gymnasium and surrounding areas of Purgatory exploded like a balloon. Then, to add worse to worst, the clouds and rain **suddenly ****stopped.**


	87. All Fear Itself

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

There lies, somewhere deep within our sanity, something evil. It is nature, primal and bloodthirsty, calling out to us, forcing us to remember the truth: that we are animals. We are parts in a system, that is all. Whatever divinity we perceive to tell us such things is nothing more than absolute delusion. Those who admit to hearing unknown voices in their heads are either committed to care or elevated to the status of pontiff. There is no ground for negotiation when dealing with the greater purpose of humanity. There is or isn't.

Perceive that this is the story centered on the latter. Conclude, through this text, that there is no purpose but purpose alone.

Now that that's out of the way, it's been quite a bit since shit started falling, so let's recap where everyone's at. Tom is stuck in fuck-up land with an Eldritch horror while Four-Eyes, with Yvonne's help, managed to steal a potent offense in his game. Sam is somewhere else, possibly dead, but mostly he's just status: unknown at the moment. Damien, lord of Purgatory, is fighting a concentrated jelly of Human Negative that Sam had earlier awoken by accident to keep Purgatory up and running-ish. Meanwhile, the Human Negative was summoned to Nny by his own madness in the form of Happy Noodle Boy, and now he, JJ, Lammy and Mort are exposed to all the madness and inhumanity that the Negative brings...

Thus enters the wet aired, open floor where Those four were gathered. Mort, on a whim of instinct, protected Nny from the enormous burst of energy that was released when the ugly demon-beast returned itself to the dark void. JJ used his own energy sphere as a counter-explosion at the perfect moment, canceling explosion with explosion, thereby protecting them from its crushing power. Lammy had simply moved to Nny's other unguarded side, one arm out and the other drawn in like a bad karate pose. A brief silence passed. It was calm and eerie for a moment...

Still silence, nothing moving but air.

"What just happened?" JJ asked.

"Ask the prophet" Lammy said, tilting her head and big hair back toward Mort. "Yo, Muhammad! What was that!" Mort's lip tensed up and his jaw clenched hard. He could hear his own teeth grinding and his own heart beating nearly out of his chest in the dead silence. He took in a deep breath and stood up.

"That" Mort began "is a very...excellent question." And he left it at that. A moment of silence later Mort realized it wasn't raining and he looked skyward. Nothing but an endless array of twilight colors. On no side of the endless horizon was there evidence of a sun but all the sky was orange and red and purple and a faded, nightly blue. "The rain is gone..." Mort said. "Is that...good? Or bad?"

"Uh, bad" Lammy said. Mort turned to her with a start.

"Why bad?" Mort asked. "Why? What did the rain do?"

"Uhhh" Lammy hummed, "now let's see. I remember hearing this, but I can't exactly piece the wording together. It was like some sort of barrier."

"The rain" JJ began, palming up a new ball of energy "was the spiritual border. If a demonic soul, like mine or Lammy's, touched it it would be like acid and we'd melt. It also kept the mindless limbo zombies in check as a sort of mental depressant. As long as the zombies were distracted by the rain, they'd do nothing but shuffle around in it. Once they stop getting wet their primal minds reactivate and they stop paying attention to the rain. They go out trying to find food, or in their case, their original demonic soul."

"...hmm" Mort huffed. "Well, well. When did you learn all this?"

"Hey, you hear a lot in this place" JJ said. "The demons that know the know like to talk. A lot!"

"Zombies, though?" Mort said. "Limbo? Hmm. There's more to this place than I assumed."

"What about this weirdo?" Lammy said. She nudged Nny with one of her afro-hidden pale hands and he simply fell over. "Is he dead or what?"

"He better not be" JJ said. "Yo, Mort! I wanna see you guys fight. I wanna know how a guy this scrawny can hold of a man made of muscle like you!" Mort approached Nny and took a glance down at his face. It was still frozen in pure terror. The after-effects of a psychological rape, no doubt, were still fresh within his mortal mind. Mort leaned down and placed his hand on Nny's shoulder to turn him on his back.

"What's wrong with his eyes?" Lammy said in disgust. Mort inspected closer and saw that his eyes were in fact rapidly moving around, as if he were dreaming. Mort held his hands our far apart and clapped them together next to Nny's ear. Suddenly, the maniac was awake and shot to his feet to look around in a frightened paranoia.

"What...was that?" he asked. Mort stood up, his shadow going over Nny, and cleared his throat.

"Don't you know?" Mort asked. "Wasn't it exactly the monster you wanted it to be? And that other thing, it was your 'creation' as well, wasn't it? The stickman." Nny turned his head and scoffed with a grin. "So long as we're trapped here, we may as well obligate ourselves to some legitimate answers. What is happening? Who are you?" Nny walked past Mort and across the level ground that had once been a gym. He looked out across the plane that stretched so far at the endless maze of halls and rooms that was the realm of Purgatory. **A never-ending high-school building, the truest Hell of them all, going on forever in any direction but stopping at twenty-stories up at its highest.** Nny gave a nostalgic sigh.

"Man, this place is huge" he said.

"It's the afterlife" Mort said "or at least a part of it. To accommodate all the necessary souls, it'd have to be quite large."

"But, it's not that big" Nny said. "In fact, I've seen much larger infinity-realms like this before. Strange and magical places filled with broken promises and twelve-ton crates of mind-fuck."

"...I am growing impatient of your ambiguity" Mort said. "If I have to fight you then I will, but I _must _have answers!"

"Then I'll give them to you" Nny said. Mort was startled. Nny turned himself half around with his side still facing where the dark wall had been. "I'm not important, right now. In fact, I can wait a while to be a villain again. It'll make it more rewarding for me. However, what I can tell you about this event is that it was no mere coincidence of happenstance. The fact that I came here, on a completely random gust of wind, has everything to do with why this thing came out. All of these demons were produced here to simulate the former lives of those whose sin-filled hearts were dragged into this pitiful corner of postmortem. Those two are nothing but artificial beings modeled after whoever they were upon arrival. They're imitations with embellished detail, given life through an unlimited source of power and life."

"Which is?" Mort asked.

"**Despair**" Nny said. "All the negativity of humanity does not simply drift off and disappear. It is _stored._" Mort gulped, for somewhere in his mind there pinged the alarm of emergency and danger. "You see, **I used to be that very container. I am the former Waste Lock for the Human Negative. You may call me Nny.**" The sudden realization hit Mort like a heavy ocean wave, but he refused to give ground. He stayed perfectly still, legs straight and feet planted, and silently bade Nny to continue. "However, at one point in my 'life', as I call it with great sense of irony, I died, went to Heaven, got sent to Hell, met Satan and then came back to life. Whether he managed to replace that Waste Lock on me or move it to someone else, I never knew. Existence simply restarted when I awoke, as if nothing was ever wrong. Some time had passed, only enough for it to be sunny outside rather than dark, but that was it. Also, I had lost a lot of hair somehow. I just had two antannae-looking lengths growing out...in fact, all of that may have been a dream. I've never managed to learn the truth, and I really don't care."

"No" Mort said in the horror of realization. "It was real. I, too, have met Diablo. I...reluctantly admit that I currently work for him to claim the seat that you abandoned." Nny's interest was piqued. He cocked his brow and grinned. "He aims to crown one of us the **King of Killers...** and as for your dream, I know it must have happened, but only you would have known it. The beings of Hell, or Heaven, or someplace where they meet, have the capability to reset the world and all of its history to undo a pre-mature Apocalypse. I know because a demon told me, in the most irksome of casual ways, that it was true. I know because I have seen the seams where existence itself was folded over itself out in the cosmic void of the universal unconscious..."

"...okay" Nny said.

"I'm feeling a great swell of fear right now" Mort said, still shocked with horror. JJ and Lammy felt nothing, not even shock or awe at what the two men discussed. Part of them knew everything that was being said, and part of them simply didn't understand the language. "I'm feeling...strangely sick. Like something is burrowing inside my mind, looking for an escape! Like some ignorant mole is trying to tunnel its way through topsoil and _failing!_"

"Ah, I know that feeling" Nny said. "That's what _it_ does to you."

"..._it_...?" Mort repeated. Behind Nny there lurked the most fearsome and devilish of things. A great darkness started rising and writhing its way up from an unseen abyss below. The gym's floor became an island and all around it was a sea of darkness that kept crawling up, clawing into the floor and scraping along the sides. A horrific mess of tentacles and hands and unbound appendages all creeping together. Then from the wall that stood no more, from that part of the opened flat floor, something arose that forced Nny to glance and grin. He unsheathed his knives and stood battle-ready against a monster. **Taller than a building, made of veins and tentacles, with an enormous alligator maw near its peak emblazoned with the dark sketch of an uneven-sided box containing the arcane symbol of 'Z?'**

**This was it. The Human Negative revived. A God outside of all creation. Damnation walking. All kinds of badness and shit the likes of which curdled all mortal's mental milk into rot. **This was it. Nny just had to smile at it...

* * *

Gore and splendor surrounded Four-Eyes. His ghastly grin was blood stained and his eyes roared with a raging red glow. His skin was covered in fresh, visceral carnage, dripping blood and thick chunklets of what was once whole body. The clock reached a final count on the scoreboard and the mist of audience dissipated completely. All the demons he had stood up to face were dying, their bodies torn apart and broken open but still they suffered through the painful life of immobility while Four-Eyes tauntingly let time continue to move without doing a thing to end their own suffering. Their jaws were broken so they couldn't bite their tongues, their legs and arms were twisted and broken in multiple places and those who Four-Eyes had the perfect opportunities with had broken backs and were paralyzed.

"You all fucked me a little too far" Four-Eyes growled. "You fucked around entirely too much. Doting on the words of some unseen prophet or something, acting like zombies with your power. You're all fools. **You could have been like me!**" The clock reached its single digits. Four-Eyes glanced back and picked the ball back up, a solid recovery, and held it over the gaping void. The play was still in action, technically, and the game wouldn't end until the play was officially over by either down or score. Four-Eyes just grinned and waited for the clock to expire, listening to the silence of pain behind him.

A single audience still remained. Yvonne was standing, stricken with horror over the scene she was witness to just earlier. The blood and guts had never stopped her before, but when they were spilled in such a tasteless manner all sense of moral abandon left her. Rather, moral returned to her and she became appalled at the sight of demonic slaughter. At her side, Tom was still out of it and stunned with fear. She sat back down with him and started to rub his shoulder.

"You poor boy" she said. She took Tom's body, all of his consciousness that would have enjoyed her presence so much lost, and held his head to her chest. "You...poor boy. You must regret all of this now...I do. Tom, please pull through this with me. I can't face this terrible place alone..." The clock struck zero and Four-Eyes dropped the ball. His mouth was a fanged smile of menace and glee. "I'm too human to make it any further..."

And thus, the game was won. Those players still alive were killed in an instant by arcane forces and their bodies were taken back into the devouring grass beneath them. Four-Eyes' smile was bright and beaming with murder and joy. All that he hated was before him, broken and bleeding and now slowly vanishing into nothingness. Even the grass of the field, which he seemed to resent for no reason besides resentment, was browned and started to die rapidly all around him.

"Ah, death" Four-Eyes proclaimed. "Equality at last!" Four-Eyes chuckled and turned to the darkness as the great eye-covered hand rose up from the void with the football taking the center of its palm as the all-seeing true eye of the beast. "Hehehe...you must be my victory committee!" The darkness simply stayed in place, all the shadows around it moving and writhing about randomly. "I have conquered this realm. I am its new king. This entire place is my own domain. I demand a tribute! **Bring me destruction and doom to this place at once, for I am its ruler and wish it gone!**" The dark hand didn't move. However, it didn't decline anything either.

Yvonne gazed on in shock and horror as the dark thing rose up from the end of the field. The bleachers behind her started to rumble. The deep sounds of grinding metal was heard everywhere, an eerie and pulsating low of mechanical monsters bloodily roaring. The noise dulled down quickly, leaving the air shaken and thin from the vibrations. Yvonne had to clutch her hands to her head to keep the pain at bay and hunched over herself. When it stopped she rose up and saw Tom drop down from his seat, face to the dirt.

"Tom!" she exclaimed. "Tom, are you alright?" Tom groaned and picked himself up. Yvonne rushed to his side and helped him up off the ground.

"Yvonne?" Tom said. "Wait, what's going on here? Did we win?"

"What happened to you?" Yvonne demanded. "You were standing out there staring off into space like you were dead! I was worried sick! What the hell happened to you?" Tom looked at Yvonne for a moment, staring into her eyes to see her wholly shaken form. He picked himself up with her and stood next to her, staring deep into her eyes.

"You...were worried about me?" Tom asked. Yvonne suddenly blushed, realizing what she had said. She nodded, trying to keep a stern face to hide her embarrassment. "Well...what happened? The last thing I remembered was one huge guy landing on Four-Eyes. Is he alright?" Yvonne turned to the field, prompting Tom to look as well. He saw the demon some distance away, near the endzone, holding his hands to the back of his neck and hunching over as if in pain. He started growling so loudly that it shook Tom and Yvonne's chest bones. His raging cry of pain turned into a maddening cackle and he forced his body to stand upright. The skin on his back began to stretch and contort to the pushing of something underneath it. In a bloody burst his back opened up and **long, black demon's wings unfolded from his own flesh.** As the pain subsided his wretched glee increased and Four-Eyes abandoned what humanity he seemed to retain in an instant of pure demonic force.

His call was so powerful that the tarp covering the open stadium was ripped off by the gale and thrown to the winds. Bright orange light shone down from the sky, a cloudless expanse of twilight colors that mixed harmoniously together in all corners of the eye. Four-Eyes beheld the sky and paused in his celebration of rage.

"That's strange" he said. "It's always raining here..."

"Wasn't it raining earlier?" Yvonne asked. "Does this place have normal weather after all?" Yvonne turned to Tom to see his reaction, but yet again he was stunned by fear. Yvonne tried to shake Tom out of his daze. "Oh no. Tom, not again. Don't do this again...!"

"I remember" Tom said. He started to move forward, toward the endzone and the reaching black hand. "I can remember what happened. I didn't black out after all. Something called me, it wanted to use me. It needed my body..."

"Tom, wait!" Yvonne called. "Where are you going?"

"It was a King dressed in Yellow," Tom continued through his trance. "To look upon him was to behold an unknown fear. A moving shadow in a land without light. A horror that can never be named. Yes, I met him and he told me of humanity's origin on our Earth and our tie to all the universe. He asked me for my assistance in correcting what went wrong in his building of a better race of creatures..." Tom stopped, standing at the ten yard line. Four-Eyes turned and looked down at him with a sinister smirk. Yvonne shied away by a few yards out of fear for the hand. The ominous shadow stayed static like a statue until Tom reached up with a finger extended to it.

"I answered him..." Tom said. The hand drew down and curled itself up. All the writhing darkness and smoky aura around it faded away and it became a solid, giant arm draped in golden-yellow cloth and armor. Four-Eyes jumped away and stood between Tom and Yvonne to protect her.

"Help him!" Yvonne said. "Save Tom!"

"...if he's in danger" Four-Eyes said. "Right now I don't see anything happening, but I can feel something weird..." Yvonne looked past Four-Eyes, ducking under his unfolded and blood-soaked wings to watch the hand come closer and closer to Tom. He didn't try to move out of the way. He stood as a receiver, taking in the cosmic call of a stronger entity, recalling the very words he answered in the mental plane where he had been pulled, and with a cocky grin and glare he repeated them.

"**Why the fuck not?"** Tom jumped up and connected his finger with the finger of the giant. In a flash of light, Tom's body disappeared but the hand remained.

"TOOOOOOM!" Yvonne shouted. Four-Eyes turned around and grabbed her in his arms. He sped away and made a flying leap off the ground. The football field was slowly dying, the brown grass giving way to a black rot. Four-Eyes flew, beating the wind with his new and powerful wings to ascend quickly while keeping a struggling Yvonne in his clutch. "Let go of me now! I have to help!"

"How?" Four-Eyes shouted. "By rushing in and dying? What good is he to you, anyway?"

"He's the only one who understands me!" she protested. "He and I need each other! **We don't belong here anyway!**" Four-Eyes looked down at her and felt her struggling stop. As he flew he kept his head forward to steer properly. Yvonne buried her face into his chest and sobbed quietly while he turned in the air. At his side he saw the field collapse and cave into itself. A giant hole was opened up beneath the stadium ground and all of the gigantic atrium's dirt was rotted into a black tar that fell down into a gaping void. However, where the dirt left something beneath it remained. A giant body beyond all possible measure was revealed to rest underneath the realm of Purgatory. Its hands slowly moved up as its body was brought up from the darkness.

**A shining beast of Gold, cloaked all in Yellow, with a face hidden behind a flat metal mask. It was the King, All Fear Itself, a great and powerful thing that had ruled the subconscious realm of all creatures near it for so long. **Four-Eyes knew it. He could call its name. For safety, he simply held Yvonne tighter and veered away to fly right out of the godless pit of swallowed ground.

"Tom'll be fine" Four-Eyes said. "Just stop crying. It's making my chest cold..." So he flew off, over the infinite rooftops of Purgatory, a free soul in the highest regard...

* * *

Damien Thorn, King of Purgatory, fought an ever-losing battle against a horror beyond description. The gelatinous puddle of pure madness had already stolen his arm and wore it within its slime-like form. It was dissolved right down to the bone which it used as the base for a proper arm to attack with. Damien kept himself alive and upright by coiling the dark tentacles of Nyarlathotep into his open wound to stop it from bleeding profusely. He was becoming more and more hopeless over the thoughts of victory and he could feel his realm dying. He knew Purgatory was in a poor state beyond the room he was in. He felt the summoning of the Human Negative as it had burst its way into existence. He could feel everything moving around in a bloody panic within the infinite plane, yet he could do nothing about it.

_It must end_ Damien thought _before it can fully reform! I have no choice! I must end this myself!_ Damien opened his fanged demon mouth and roared out pure fire. The flames spread through the air and hit the blob with no effect. The fire vanished, leaving the blob unharmed with its skeletal arm up, while Damien dashed past it. Pseudopods shot from the blob's form at Damien, brushing against his black tentacle armor and dissolving it like acid, leaving his skin exposed to the heat of the room. He pushed through the pain, gritting his teeth, and punched through the thick barrier that kept his live, beating heart connected to the life of the very dimension the endless palace occupied.

Nyarlathotep opened Damien's chest of fire-skin and revealed the blank space where Damien's heart was plucked from through some unknown ritual. He breathed in excited gasps of pain as he slowly brought his heart back to his chest. The arteries reached on their own to connect with the hollow tubes of fire that swirled within his body. The closer his hand brought the heart the hotter it got and the hotter it seemed to glow.

_With this Purgatory will fall_ Damien thought _but once the threat is gone, I can rebuild! So long as I keep my heart, I am immortal! Invincible! I am all-powerful,** above all the Gods and Devils and things beyond them that would dare to challenge true power!**_ Damien thrust the heart into his chest. No sooner then did the thing still behind him land a sufficient blow. A tentacle had pierced through Damien's demon back. All along its translucent edges, raw flesh could be seen. It ignored the immaterial darkness of Nyarlathotep's tentacles yet its power permeated to cleanse Damien's own demonic life.

"Ah..." Damien said, a pained and fearful little grunt. He was picked clear up off the floor and thrown into a wall. His blood and mortal flesh was cooked and blasted with the extreme heat of the boiler room. His bone that was exposed melted and sealed the pumping veins shut. His blood turned instantly into steam and the residue of solid matter left was burnt into nothing at all on the floor. "How...why?" Damien asked. The creature started to come near him again. It opened its maw of horror and let slither out a long, saliva-covered tongue. The tongue slithered across Damien's fire skin and the dark bindings of Nyarlathotep, dying out the fire that it touched to cool embers, stroking along Damien's exposed flaming flesh.

"I'll kill you" Damien said in a pained hush. The beast took its tongue from Damine's body and held it over his head like a sword hung by a string of horse's hair. Damien looked up at it with a heated glare. The fires of his rage roared back on and his lost arm was replaced by the coiling tentacles of Nyarlathotep. Revitalized, Damien swiped his claws at the demon's body and blasted it apart with his sheer force. He hadn't even touched the vile thing's form, but the power of his attack was enough to scatter its body across the room. Damien started breathing heavily, panting out ash and bright embers with each heaving breath. The hole in his chest was recovered and almost immediately his body was healed. Fire returned to the tight bindings of his false arm as his real arm started to regenerate.

"I have become my true self once more" Damien said. "No longer inhibited by my ties to this place I have regained my ultimate power! You, whatever you are, cannot hope to match my strength at this level. I am above and beyond the attempts of anything else that exists. With this power to control the arcane shadows, the bond of power that I forged with the Elder Being Nyarlathotep, coupled with my already formidable channeling of the endless Inferno, I am a **God without equal! I **_**am**_** the mountaintop! Look upon me from the dirt you crawl in and DESPAIR!**"

Damien was all to sure of his victory, yet he still didn't know exactly what he fought. It was not an enemy that was bested by sheer strength and brutality alone. It was above such means of fighting. The gelatinous creature reformed a distance away, leaving many parts of itself still lying around, and it hissed not unlike an alligator from its reptilian, alligator-esque mouth. Damien stood fast and gathered a mass of fire around his still-well hand, preparing to attack with the hopes of obliterating the menace for good. However, as his attack gathered he heard the same hissing much closer to him than before. He looked down and saw, barely knee-high, **another slime monster with alligator mouth and amoebic body coming at him.** He jerked his leg away and jumped up, launching his attack at the thing and splattering it everywhere like a burst sack of pudding. He landed panting and watched as the puddles of slime only grew in size and depth. Each droplet of monstrous gel became a new abomination, a new maw attached to a gruesome body, all resonating with the same mad ferocity.

"That's impossible!" Damien growled. "What is this thing made of? It can negate my powers, even Nyarlathotep! Could the Human Negative have grown so strong in its short containment? Is this at all possible?" Damien looked around at the overwhelming army amassing against him. Too many beasts for him to count, all hissing and forming tentacles all over their gelatinous bodies to reach and writhe around with. Damien reached for the vault door of the boiler room. He ran away, the only sensible thing he could do, and locked the door to seal them in. He kept his form as the fiery conqueror and sped back to the outside where it was raining and where his mighty and eternal standing testament of power still stood, stretching on through an infinite valley of misery and torment to house all the souls that Hell and Heaven rejected.

First, it wasn't raining, which confused and frithened Damien. Second, when he jet-blasted himself up into the air and stabalized himself with wings of pure fire to see over his realm, he was granted a vision of pure terror and woe. Far in the distance, on either side, were two giants. **One dressed all in Yellow. The other a mass of dark, vile madness; a mountain of tentacles and veins all pulsing and writhing together with a disturbingly familiar maw at its peak. **

"It's happened" Damien said. "It's all happened...so fast..." Damien shed a tear that dropped as molten lava to the ground. From there it slid into a thick pile of rainwater that formed itself into the slimy abomination that had pursued Damien through the very essence of reality he sped across. The monster was still nearby, but by the time Damien was alerted to it his wrists and ankles were bound by the beast's gruesome powers. Tentacles reached up from far down below as a huge mass of the mad jelly-beast had somehow brought itself far out into the open. "No! NO! **RELEASE ME!**" Damien's cries simply faded off into the expanse of sky. His endless vault of perpetual twilight did not listen to him.

_I am immortal_ Damien thought as his body struggled on reflex. _I am the bane of all creation. I am the walker of the path of pure destruction. There is no meaning in my life, only that I must bring that same meaning to all else. There is no purpose to my existence outside of destroying existence itself. I am darkness incarnate. The shepherd of the forsaken, man begotten of the Almighty to usurp the highest seat. However, I have heard it all too often. Immortality is merely a word. All things come and go. Even that which is my ally has told me such a thing. That dark pharaoh, that brazen wizard that I met...Nyarlathotep, tell me what lies at the end of my life..._

Damien was swallowed whole. The beast took him within its mouth and soon he was thrust deep into the monster's huge, gelatinous belly. He swam around in a pointless panic for a time until his fires all died. Then he was left in a brief moment of tense calmness in his suit and skin. As he looked at his fingers, counting that they were all still there, the beast began to digest him. His skin and his suit were dissolved. Damien was forced, through his own immortality, to live through his skin being slowly melted and dissolved all around him, providing ever more substance for the creature to form itself with. Once his skin was gone patches of his muscle began to peel off and his blood turned into a sick green color as it flowed through the watery substance. The acid invaded his body through his nose and mouth, eating at his organs while they were still within him. Once it chewed its way through his abdomen, his stomach and intestines had already been half-eaten. Still, he lived under the torment, hoping that it would leave once his body was completely gone. He writhed around as much as he could, but once his muscles were all gone and only his skeleton remained there was nothing he could do. Only his heart, the eternal flame of control and his brain, which allowed the transmission of such terrible pain to go on, remained.

_You told me that pain is all I am destined for_ he thought. _You told me that pain is all I am destined for. You told me that pain is all I am destined for. You told me over and over again that pain will be my end...and then when I am gone you too shall leave..._ Damien's last sight before his eyes rolled up and were promptly eaten was that of a man walking away, a sight that he imagined plastered onto his eye like a projected image onto a screen that slowly flickered down to the last frames and then stopped.

Now only his skull remained floating in the beast's belly, and only the top half of it. The beast moved it up to its head and wore it like a crown, but not before moving the immortal heart into the cranial cavity to keep it all intact. The heart beat slowly as the soul of Damien was consumed by the madness, providing the ultimate monster with the ultimate engine...

_Pain..._


	88. The Titan Moves

Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.

* * *

The carnage and gore spread like a plague. Bodies lay half eaten and bloodless, unable to melt into the inedible lumps of plastic clay they had been forcibly born from. The demons of the walls were forced out and made prey for the hungry mindless horde of zombies that roamed the endless, degrading Purgatory halls. And, like the prey they knew they had become, the innocent demons all scrambled together away from the shuffling monsters that sought to eat them and herded themselves to apparent safety. All too often they failed and only managed to speed up their extinction as the zombies forced them into blind corners blocked off by impassible rubble. One group of child-demons huddled together and hissed violently at the encroaching death that silently stalked ever closer. Then, suddenly, one pudgy youth shot to the fore of the demon huddle and caught their attention.

"Come on, gang!" he began shouting. "We can't let this horde of zombies be the end! We have to fight back! Stand our ground! Never say never, or die, or 'I cheesed in my pants cause of ZOMBIES!' We can't let them win just because we're too scared to fight back! We have to stand up for ourselves! **We're DEMONS! We can kill ANYTHING!**" For a moment the loud and eccentrically brave child was surrounded by a glow of charisma. He held his arm up high and rallied a shrill cry of bravery from those around him. Then, silently, he was grabbed from behind and lifted up to the gnarl-toothed mouths of the zombies. They bit deep into his flesh and cracked his bones. They tore him apart as he screamed bloody murder, starting with his head. One zombie mouth came from around the arm that held the boy in the air and snapped off his foot.

"**AAAAAHHHH! OHGODWHYYYYYYY! IT HURTS! IT HURTS! IT HURTS! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMYYYY!"** His cries ceased as he was turned over. His eyes continued to stream tears until they popped out of his deformed and crushed skull, along with a thickness of blood and soggy gray matter. His spine was crunched out of his back by a blood-mouthed zombie and his innards all spilled out onto the floor from the rip in his gut where the zombies had gripped his fragile flesh too hard. The other children demons shook and cowered in their defenseless corner as the other zombies came up with mouths agape and eyes soulless, their faces soon lost in the darkness that their reaching arms occupied.

Boys and girls, or the bodies of those that had once been such, were swiftly torn apart and devoured viciously. Organs were chewed into slushy pieces, bones were broken and crunched into dust. Whole bodies were quickly reduced to unliving, leaking parts as kids were torn limb from limb and head from shoulder. The zombies passed the bloody masses of flesh and blood and squishy guts throughout the whole horde, as if they had the inborn knowledge to share what they had found to increase their own power. Soon the feast was ended as the last bit of demon flesh was consumed and the mindless congregation turned and silently started stalking the halls. The only sound to accompany their presence was the muted dripping of blood from their messy jaws to the floor.

One zombie, out of the entire massive horde there present, stayed behind. She, a tall and elegant woman, stood staring at the floor with her eyes shining a despicable yellow. Then they went black and dim. Her body seemed to shut down. Her skin became baggy and hollow and all of her skin fell down, clothes included, onto the floor as a diseased, rubber suit. Floating above the floor, just within reach of the ceiling, **was an angel.** The spirit of that zombie had been released and floated just above the gore and vileness that it had just earlier enacted. The woman, with a swooping bobcut of hair and wide, bright-looking eyes, floated like a ghost in the ghostly realm, stunned in a state of unbelievable shock and joy. She touched her face and ran her hands all across her body, feeling nothing but a warm and universal presence of light.

"I'm free" she said. She burst up through the rood, expanding a wide set of shining, angelic wings and started a flighted ascent to the clouds. **"I'M FREEEE!**" she called once more. "Finally! FINALLY! After so long, trapped in this hell, I'm free! My sins have all been redeemed, my spiritual body reclaimed and purified! I hold no sorrow! I have no regret! I feel weightless and supreme! This is magnificent, I'm totally free!" She looked down at the hole in the roof she had made and then out to the rest of the roof's infinite expanse. In one direction the clouds all converged on a distorted focal point in the air preceded by a towering, wriggling darkness. To the other side, much closer to her, she saw another giant whose wide back and broad head blocked the light of the veiled sun.

"It looks like I was freed just in time" the woman said with a cocky pump of her fist. "Things seem to be taking a turn for the worse!" The woman suddenly accelerated in her flight upwards and sped to the heavens. Whether she would reach them or not in truth was inconsequential right then. Even if it was to escape the reach of those sudden titans, she would hide in the clouds until heaven found her. "Worry not, all you still-damned souls. I shall go to heaven and rally an army to wipe this godless place from all of existence! An Armageddon will descend and lift the cleansed and repented forever to the holy kingdom! Wait and rejoice, mass of souls! I will return...!" And so she left the hellish scene to its own undoing.

In the halls, blood still spilled. Children were killed and cannibalized outright by soulless, mindless automatons of flesh and desire. The uncontrollable wave of zombified husks sought out their individual selves within each of the fleeing demons. Their memories reunite and their sins are repented instantaneously as both halves merge. More and more ascended sinners, repented angels from all epochs of time and space left trapped there in endless Purgatory since time immemorial continued to ascend. A rain of light in reverse filled Purgatory! Souls were lifted up in great throngs to the skies, all with the same intent to see the divine march of angels wipe out the land that had too-long claimed their souls. The beams of light shot up with increasing speed and out of random origin, making flight for anything other than the angles difficult if not impossible.

So Four-Eyes, who continued to fly through the endless sky, forced himself to land to keep himself and Yvonne safe. He roosted upon a broken rooftop and punched away a falling air-conditioner unit which seemed to scream as if fell the incalculable height to the ground far below.

"What the fuck is going on now?" Four-Eyes lowed. He felt something odd at his side. Yvonne felt uncommonly warm. She pushed his hand away and stood up on the uneven ground, looking out to the field of lights before her.

"Do you hear that?" she asked. Four-Eyes grunted in denial. "It's so wonderful, like a dream, like a God-sent symphony. Now I think I can understand what a 'miracle' is..."

"What are you talking about?" Four-Eyes demanded. Yvonne slowly turned to him, her hair as silky and bright and blonde as it ever was, like any day after she'd gone for a fresh styling and setting at the highest end salon in sight.

"The sound of the choir" she said "is lovely." To a demon, the sight of an angel is little more than redundant repulsion. The duality between the good and evil of the cosmos forced the ears and eyes of the wicked away from the pure and good of heaven's creation. However, to those of neither world, to the humans who would experience any divine stroke of thought and witness the grace of such benevolence in God's name, they could hear the most serene music imaginable. The _Ode to Joy_ was indeed heavenly music, as it played in an endless echo through Yvonne's mind, calming her fears and cooling her racing blood, removing all the toxic remains of vehemence and evil from her body for just that one brief glimpse that she took, giving her a true experience of heaven in hell...

* * *

Meanwhile, real men were fighting, and they were fighting a giant made of tentacles. One varicose-veined tree-thick appendage smashed into the floor, forcing out a mighty gust from either side of the impact, separating the fighting force of four. JJ and Lammy held themselves fast on the beast's left side while Nny and Mort stood firm on its right.

"You know this thing" Mort said to his maniac ally, "so you should know its weakness. Where's its weak spot?"

"It's a monster made of insanity" Nny said. "It _has_ no weak spot." Mort became grim for a moment, but recovered and became cross and battle-stern once more. "Just chop things off until it bleeds to death!" Nny jumped away, a long and almost gliding leap right into the beast's broad front. He picked a random vein and stabbed into it, then guided his body down as his blade sliced through the skin and let out a shower of blood onto the floor. Nny kicked himself off of the Beast just before he slid past the edge of the platform's edge and landed with a long slide into the puddle of blood. The droplets curved past him and the liquid all parted from his feet as he slid across it. The beast made no motion to acknowledge its newest, bleeding wound and instead turned the leaking vein around so that it bled into its own thick body. As the last of the blood fell, Mort raced forward with his shovels equipped in defense.

"RAAAGGHH!" Mort roared. He ran past Nny and swung his shovels to intercept a swinging tentacle from above. The massive length of flesh and coursing veins pushed down on Mort's human frame and forced his strong feet to crack the floor beneath. Mort's strength was soon to give, but the tentacle was beat away by JJ's quick assistance. It swung then toward Nny, who stood callously in place and let it sweep right past him. The half still attached to the immense body coiled around with a broad shower of blood while the other half slithered and writhed around until it wriggled its way off of the elevated battleground. Mort recovered and sheathed his shovels.

"This seems impossible" Mort said.

"Why don't you fly up and kill its head?" JJ asked.

"Flight isn't a normal human ability" Mort said.

"You ain't a normal human, man!" JJ proclaimed. "Look at you! You may be human, but you damn sure ain't a normal one! What human can see the 'winds of destiny' or whatever you called them? What human wouldn't break down and faint the second they saw something like this bearing down at them?" Mort looked up at the living catastrophe, with a head so high that the beams of light only blurred the humid air that led to it. Mort steeled his resolve and equipped his chainsaw. As he revved it and the engine compartment shook with wicked power the roar of Gore seemed to lessen. The deafening screech of bloodshed was lost to the sheer insanity all around.

"You okay?" JJ shouted.

"I'm quite fine" Mort said. "Keep yourself well!" Mort dashed off, roaring above the mute hum of Gore, and taunted the Beast before him by kicking a stray chunk of rock in its direction. The rock hit and seemed to summon up its wormy flesh to unfold and let extend several long, fleshy tentacles. As they unrolled from under the thing's great barrier of skin they turned their ends toward Mort and let burst open their puckered ends. With a shrill, demonic screeching, three demon worms with mouths of sharp, spinning teeth opened their moist maws and dove at Mort. The man jumped away with a retreating swing of his weapon and scratched the surface of one worm's skin. A shallow burst of blood shot out and gathered itself into a broader and broader pool that started to slowly surround Nny.

"Still not enough" Nny said as he slowly sheathed his knives. "This thing needs to bleed more, so much more, before all this blood dries! It's weakness is the same as ever, **but only **_**I**_** can exploit it!**" Nny, suddenly, unsheathed a great and deranged looking scythe from his billowing black coat and grinned with the same crooked metallic angle that the blade had to it. A tentacle covered in spines raced his way, only to be cut along its entire length by Nny's powerful scythe. Nny was pushed back across the floor as the tentacle continued to push him while spraying blood enough to cover and flood the floor behind Nny. He swung his scythe down, deepening a great bloody crevice in the creature's tentacle, then cut to both sides, slicing off the split parts of the Beast's bisected appendage. What was left retreated into the demon's flesh and was covered by yet more sinuous tentacle growths.

"It must be covered" Nny said. "There can't be a single spot on this canvas to impede my work..." Nny turned to see how those others with him were faring. Lammy and JJ kept up a constant barrage of energy projectiles aimed high up at the Beast's head. Mort, meanwhile, fought giant worms with his chainsaw and precise athleticism. Despite the soaked floor and the constant flooding of demonic blood, Mort managed to keep his feet solidly grounded and steady as he slashed and hacked through the worm's flesh. Once their bodies were cut open their innards opened into yet more salivating, toothy tunnels that reached and darted Mort's way. Their length seemed infinite as well, though three was the most Mort was fighting at the time. Nny rushed over with his scythe in hand, dashing across the bloody floor to assist his temporary ally.

Just as Mort saw himself in potential danger, in rushed Nny to slice the three worms into mangled, stringy, bleeding chunks of flesh and teeth. Mort stood in a respectful awe as Nny casually paced in his line of sight.

"I can fight this thing" Nny said "on _my_ terms."

"Then do it" Mort said. "Please."

"Not that simple" Nny said. "Firstly, this is the representation of humanities generalized malaise and despair as made real through _my eyes._ It is my **artistic vision** of suffering and despair, inspired roughly by Lovecraft and Geiger."

"I'd venture to say that there may be some Kafka in there somewhere" Mort said. "That or you're simply a deeply disturbed man."

"It could be anything" Nny said with a shrug. "I can use its blood as a 'base', like a canvas, and enter a surreal state of exsistence known as the 'Sea of Sartre' where I can control reality." Mort's eyes grew wide with shock as the spray of blood reached and somehow completely missed his body.

"I've heard that before" Mort said in shock. "I believe I know...or perhaps I don't."

"In any case" Nny said "I need blood everywhere. Wet blood, too. If it's not wet, I can't use it."

"You're going to paint it to death?" Mort said. Nny started walking toward the center of the floor with a grin that stretched uncomfortably far across his face. Mort turned his attention back to the spraying blood and flesh of the worms as a whole new horror began to descend. Mort jumped out of the way, guided by the winds of fate, to narrowly avoid being smashed by a **giant, bony, green-skinned hand and arm.**

"Now it's growing arms?" Mort shouted. He skid to a stop in the blood and rushed up before the hand could move. He jumped up, sure to land on it, with his chainsaw poised to be stabbed through its horrid flesh. The hand, with incredible and impossible swiftness, moved to wipe away much of the blood that had been already gathered. Mort landed on mostly dry floor and was hit as the hand came back his way. He tumbled end over end clear to the other side of the floor, saved by Gore as he stabbed it into the ground to drag himself to the side. The hand swept yet more blood off of the platform and then balled itself into a tight, bony fist. Nny, from his stance in the middle of the floor, gave his scythe a good hard throw and sliced clean through the thin bone of the giant's arm. The scythe, however, was lost as the skin opened up to accept it and then closed to keep it.

"Damn!" Nny exclaimed. "It's hard to buy good tools like that anymore!" He equipped a knife instead. His other hand was kept free but stayed near his pocket, ready to withdrawal whatever weapon he had waiting just in case. When Mort recovered and saw the hand had died and slowly slipped off the edge of the floor, he saw an equal chance to act. He stabbed his chainsaw into the floor and mounted it. Riding it like an automatic, ground-raping unicycle, Mort dashed toward the behemoth's skin and made a flying leap from the edge of the floor. As he drifted through the air he made sure his goggles were tightly fastened over his eyes and tossed his chainsaw from his feet into his hands.

"**FUCKING DIIIIIIIIIIIE!"** he howled. He stabbed the chainsaw into the Beast's tough, black skin and drifted quickly downward as his mass forced him to fall. Then, through his farseer goggles, he saw a path of wind open before him. All across the hurricane of confusion and blasphemy that the creature seemed to be composed of, Mort could see a single path open up through it and lead straight up seemingly infinitely. He revved the chainsaw, forcing it to increase its already substantial destructive RPMs, and began a slow climb up the creature's meshed black flesh. As he went, blood started to spray out just behind him. He left a deep bleeding wound with each inch he managed to crawl, and the stupid behemoth couldn't bother to notice him, it seemed. He felt the shaking impact of small explosions near him as Lammy and JJ fended off the tentacles that reached for him at their distance. The blood that the hand hadn't wiped away had already started to spill back into the blank space of the floor while Nny stood and waited.

Two more long, bladed tentacles erupted suddenly from the Beast's skin, forcing Mort out of position for a second. He stabbed back into the monster's hide and continued his slow climb upwards. Blood rained down, soaking the otherwise off-white floor with a deep, flowing red. Nny grinned as his canvas was slowly spread out. A knife in one hand, **a paintbrush in the other**.

* * *

The other giant of the battlefield, shining gold and radiating with primal horror, stood amidst a cloud of ruin and at the beginning of a hard-carved path. Underneath its massive stature the slaughter continued. Demons were being eaten by their hollow former selves. A whole group of anorexic dust-girls were being painfully consumed by a group the flesh-eaters, and every odd often an angel would rise up out of the crowd and ascend as fast as it could to the clouds. The ascended many ignored the very obvious signs of immortal danger that towered over the battlefield, the two colossal giants of pure destruction and despair. They had risen above the need for concern and rightly ignored the battle at hand.

However, they were far from immortal yet. Hastur, the giant of gold, began moving forward. His flesh started to peel from his broad, powerful humanoid form as he powered his way through the air and wind. An angel leisurely flying upwards hit against Hastur's skin and scraped along his stomach, opening a long and billowing flap of skin like a layer of latex paint. The giant continued forward, its knees losing skin in great amounts to the friction of the walls and floors it marched through, while the sturdy, flat mask of its face held fast as a menacing mirror of its target.

The towering Negative, grotesque and huge in the reachable distance, held its own without a clue as to what forces approached it. The arrogant mass seemed sufficed to play with the toys currently nearer to its main body while it kept wriggling two tower-length tentacles at its side, constantly intertwining with thinner lengths of itself to create disgusting helices of fleshy muscles. The giant marched, a Deus ex Mania, driven only by the command of destruction from within.

On the other side of the mask, Tom pressed his forehead against the flat pane and watched. He stood with total darkness behind him and a smoky haze still circling near him. Behind him in that smoke stood the King in Yellow, All Fear Itself, **Hastur**. They were the tandem pilots of the golem, though only Tom was unaware of it.

"It is the horizon of despair" Hastur said from his veil of the darkness. "What lies beyond it reaches far outside of human knowledge."

"So beyond despair" Tom said "is something so horrible that fear must take its place...right?"

"Don't try to trivialize the importance of summoning the enormous avatar of all terror and primal fear with such a _human_ analogy" Hastur said. "What you see is the despair of the mind. Self-inflicted insanity, a pitiable disease. What we are within is the cure: Where the insane lake all normal fear, we shall force it upon them. **Only the dead do not fear death.**"

"Wise" Tom said. "You ever gonna stop the monologues?" Hastur pulled Tom away from the window and held him with an invisible hand in the darkness.

"We are united now, Thomas" Hastur said. "Consider this a peak of your own power." He let Tom go and cleared the smoky darkness from around them. They stood within sight of each other, Tom the boy still struck with a demented reflex of good humor and Hastur the King in Yellow. "This golden golem represents the force of fear. What we march against is our enemy, something which forces men to see past fear and its benefits to an unholy and insane ground of mind."

"You sure are uppity about fear" Tom said. "I know you _are_ fear, and you_ made it somehow_, but shouldn't a human who conquers his living fears be praised for overcoming the system? Shouldn't abandoning fear to live life be rewarded somehow? That's what I'd do if I stunted to knowledge of an entire planet's dominant species."

"Firstly" Hastur began, "the infinitely outnumbering bacterium are the superior species of Earth." Tom blinked. He couldn't easily refute that, but he didn't want it to stand. "Secondly, fear is a limiter. Do you understand every processing and constantly working part of your brain perfectly enough to use it every single day? Fear blocks many of the thoughts and harmful neurological processes born into humanity to keep them alive. If curiosity weren't subdued by fear, one would jump into a pit of fire for curiosity if he could survive. And would he?"

"If he were some kind of kooky monk or something" Tom said. Hastur sighed and shook his head. His veil flapped to and fro, covering whatever face he had behind it.

"We have a lifetime for me to explain this to you" Hastur said. "However, if this monster is allowed to exist without any control, that life will end far too early. You must take control of this golem and **destroy the inhuman menace.**" Hastur took from within his regal robe an object hidden by a bundle of silken, weightless cloth. Just from the general shape and weight distribution of the thing, Tom had inherently known what it was. A flood of nostalgic feelings came over him. Upon knowing, he seemed to smile, and as he unwrapped the godly gift his grin grew and grew until his smile resembled that of a bright-faced child.

**It was a _PS3 motion-sensitive controller made of GOLD! _And rimmed with _Platinum!_ The face buttons were patterned with _Diamonds!_ **The pomp and flair of the illustrious device gave off a glaring light that reflected off of Tom's own glistening eyes. He turned around and the smoke all around him cleared. He saw plainly out of the giant's frontal view and held his controller facing forward. He started up the connection and started excitedly testing out all the buttons. His smile dropped almost immediately upon his finger clicking on a hardened shoulder button.

"The R1 sticks" Tom said. He tested out the button again and again, and then the synch signal failed. "What am I supposed to connect this to, exactly?"

"I don't know" Hastur said. Tom kept clicking the R1 button, which was hard to push down and stuck once every few times.

"See that?" Tom said. "This this sticks. That sucks. Do I need that button that much for a mech-sim?" Hastur shook his head in grief. "Can you get me a flat toothpick and some lubricant? Or maybe some dish soap, something could be lodged in there..." Hastur stole the controller back, worked it around behind his back and then held it out, testing the button again. It worked fine, and the controller synched up.

"Here" Hastur said. "Take note, that object is one born obtusely from your own subconscious. It is the ideal vision of your own making for the power of control over an absolute being. It's shape, in general, is arbitrary. The sad fact that you struck it with so many inconveniences only shows how little faith you have in yourself."

"Pshh" Tom scoffed. He materialized a chair out of black smoke, a nice sturdy chair with speakers in the back hooked up to seemingly nothing, that glided about without any wheels. He scooted himself up as close to the observing window as he could so that the entire thing was in view. Too far and he would lose detail. Too close and his focus would diminish. "So I take it it's up to me to designate a button mapping, too?"

"Correct" Hastur said. "It is controlled only how you would see to control it."

"Cool" Tom said. He pressed select, instantly designating it as a 'Fighting-Mode' button, and assumed total command of the giant. With a flash of light the flat mask lit up and as the reflection rippled away the vision of a stern skull-face shone out on the perfectly flat surface, something of an internal projection. The glare of light caught the Beast's attention as it slowly turned its enormous alligator maw up from the floor it watched and hissed at so diligently.

Along the roofs and through the halls a grim shadow crept. It fled toward the flying debris of ruin the left under Tom's command. The shadow leaped into the thick of the flying dust and brick, then vanished. It reappeared as a tangled mess of pitch-blackness climbing up the enormous back of the giant avatar, then it vanished after crawling behind a loose drag of skin hanging from the back of the giant's neck. Tom suddenly winced in pain and pushed back against the headrest of his comfy-ass lounging chair.

"Gah!" he exclaimed. "Feels like I took a needle to the base of my spine!"

"That can only mean one thing right now" Hastur said. He turned around and faced a total, swirling darkness. The inky black substances cashed and rumbled like dark clouds of rain, then dissipated and spread out as a shadow emerged in human form. Tall, dark, shrouded in an aura of impressionable mystery. **A pharaoh, dark-skinned and regal looking, like a God born human,** stood in a trashy ensemble more befitting a New England professor on a visit to the cold shore. A fog-gray trench coat, sweater-vest and formal shirt with pitch-black tie, plain beige corduroy pants and white alligator shoes.

"The messenger is arrived" spoke the man with a voice that could charm a thousand men and women. Hastur nodded to him.

"Welcome, **Nyarlathotep**" spoke Hastur. "You see, behind me, my new vessel, Thomas Quindale."

"Uhhh" Tom grunted. He was in his gaming mode. The Elder Deities turned to look at him mouth agape and eyes void of humanity. He had set his controls on a strangely present digital screen and entered his username as 'teh_runny_sh|t'. Said usurname was displayed in plain Latin characters on the face of the golden golem in outstanding black text. He was lost to them both. Lost to the world. Reunited at last with his passion, Tom had reentered into the shallow world of **GAMING...**


End file.
